Not as you R: Adapting the French rhotic into Berber. Issue 1 (23rd July 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Lahrouchi, Mohamed
• Is Part Of: Glossa. Volume 5:Issue 1(2020)
• Publication Date: 2020-07-23
• Subjects: Loanword phonology -- rhotics -- French -- Tashlhiyt Berber; Linguistics -- Periodicals; Language and languages -- Periodicals; 410.5
• DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.874
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2397-1835

Abstract

Abstract : This article examines the adaptation of the French rhotic in Berber. In loanwords borrowed from French, the uvular fricative is systematically interpreted as a coronal tap, despite the fact that Berber has phonemic /ʁ/ and /χ/. It is argued that this phenomenon is determined by phonological rather than phonetic factors. It is shown that Tashlhiyt Berber speakers, including monolinguals, are able to identify the French r as a sonorant, based on their native phonology, where many co-occurrence restrictions are analyzed in terms of sonority-sensitive dependency relations between the most sonorous segment and its neighboring segments.