Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

Precoda, 1989). The languages in question are Hopi, Ojibwa, Goajiro,
Nenets and Norwegian. However, only one of the languages in UPSID,
Ojibwa, has preaspirated stops in its inventory. This apparent discrepancy
has its explanations. First, in Hopi, Nenets and Norwegian, preaspiration
is found only in dialects and can thus not be said to be a feature of
each of these languages as a whole. For Hopi, as we saw earlier, the
speech in only one out of the four villages studied had preaspirated stops.
For Nenets, only speakers of the Forest dialect preaspirate, while speakers
of the Tundra dialect (who by far outnumber the Forest dialect speakers)
do not. As regards Norwegian, there are reports of preaspiration in a
few relatively small areas involving only a handful of Norway’s numerous
dialects. And as regards Goajiro, we saw earlier that even if preaspiration
was once normative in the language, it seems to have died out
completely. We are thus left with Ojibwa as the only preaspirating language
in UPSID.
2.5 How rare is preaspiration?
Judging by UPSID, in which only one of the 451 languages has preaspiration,
preaspirated stops are even more exclusive than, for example,
dental and lateral clicks. This does raise the issue of whether the frequency
of occurrence of preaspiration in the world’s languages is being
severely underestimated. The main cause of concern here is that preaspiration
is, at least in my own experience, a fairly subtle phonetic feature
(for reasons that we shall try to unearth in the following section). In auditory
analysis, one can easily miss instances of preaspiration if one is not
specifically looking for them. Thus it is quite conceivable that many an
impressionistic analysis of the phonology of a language fails to accord
the preaspirated consonant its rightful place.
Another concern is that, as we have seen, dialectal variations are, to a
large extent, not represented in the UPSID data. This could be the case in
phonemic descriptions of languages in general. A case in point is Norwegian,
the only Nordic language 1 in UPSID. It is well established that
several Norwegian dialects do have preaspirated stops (cf. Chapter 3.4),
1
The term “Nordic language” is used here to refer to those languages (and dialects) that
derive from Old Norse.
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