Markedness of the environment and frequency of occurrence are often cited factors that may be influential in phonological development. Acquisition of Turkish liquids provides an interesting case to determine which of these two forces is dominant. Data on liquids from a group of normally developing, and a group of phonologically disordered children were looked at. Results show that the unmarked word-initial liquids, despite a huge disadvantage created by their infrequency in this position, have the highest success rate in acquisition.

Liquid development in Turkish: Salience vs. Frequency

IPA Illustration of Northern Tosk Albanian [tosk1239].

Northern Tosk Albanian

Albanian (endonym: Shqip ; Glotto: alba1268) is an Indo-European language which has been suggested to form an independent branch of the Indo-European family since the middle of the nineteenth century (Bopp 1855, Pedersen 1897, Çabej 1976). Though the origin of the language has been debated, the prevailing opinion in the literature is that it is a descendant of Illyrian (Hetzer 1995). Albanian is currently spoken by around 6–7 million people (Rusakov 2017: 552; Curtis 2018: 1800), the majority of whom live in Albania and Kosovo, with others in Italy, Greece, North Macedonia and Montenegro. Figure 1 shows a map of the main Albanian-speaking areas of Europe, with major linguistic subdivisions according to Gjinari (1988) and Elsie &amp; Gross (2009) marked by different colours and shades. 

This research investigated contrastive perception of L1 phonological categories in Albanian–English bilinguals who returned to Albania after living abroad for over on average a decade. In Standard Albanian, there are phonemic contrasts between /c/ and /tʃ/, /ɫ/ and /l/, and /ɹ/ and /r/. These phonemic contrasts do not occur in English. Using a “real speech” binary minimal pair identification task, we compared the accuracy and response times of bilingual returnees against functional Albanian monolinguals who had never lived abroad. Results showed that (1) reaction times for /c/ versus /tʃ/ were longest for both groups, indicating that this contrast was “harder” than the other contrasts. Surprisingly, (2) bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in accurately identifying /c/ versus /tʃ/; and (3) no significant group differences were found for the other two phonemic contrasts. In combination with other research showing that Albanian is undergoing a merger of /c/ and /tʃ/, our findings suggest that this merger is more advanced in monolinguals than bilinguals—probably because the bilinguals were abroad when the merger started. Examination of variation within the bilinguals indicated that (4) the younger the speaker was when they left Albania, and the more recently they had returned, the lower their accuracy was in identifying the laterals. These phonological findings enhance our understanding of perceptual L1 attrition whilst underlining the need to examine language change in the country of origin in L1 attrition research.

/pdf/sound-change-in-albanian-monolinguals-and-albanian-english-ko1n5lgt.pdf

Sound Change in Albanian Monolinguals and Albanian–English Sequential Bilingual Returnees in Tirana, Albania

Abstract The Serbo-Croatian language was but one of the casualties of the wars of the Yugoslav secession, as it was discursively forcefully split into first two, then three, and recently four allegedly separate languages. The first line of division was promoted by Serbian and Croatian nationalist linguists during the early nineties, soon to be followed by the invention of a standalone Bosnian language, even though contemporary linguistics agrees that Serbo-Croatian, with its regional varieties (as a standardized polycentric language), is a single language. Coming late into the fray, nationally-minded linguists from Montenegro achieved the state-driven proclamation of Montenegrin as a separate language to be in official use within the state only in 2007. Backed by the state, a coterie of nationalist literary theorists and linguists started discursively promoting Montenegrin in academic and public spaces, mostly via the dubious quasi-academic journal titled Lingua Montenegrina. This article explores the manners in which Montenegrin nationalist linguists discursively created what they dub to be a language entirely separate from all variants of Serbo-Croatian, which are mostly contained in encomiastic texts about key nationalists, attempts to classify several allophones and phonemes as well as to assert the purported primordial character of the language.

https://www.sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/auseur-2018-0005

The Discursive Creation of the ‘Montenegrin Language’ and Montenegrin Linguistic Nationalism in the 21st Century

The Albanian language constitutes a distinct branch in the Satem division of the Indo-European languages. It is the direct descendant of the ancient Illyrian of Roman times, together with some Thracian influences. Since Albania is an isolated and mountainous region, and there has been no attempt at standardizing a literary language until very recent years, the number of local dialects, varying in grammar and syntax, in vocabulary, and in phonetic structure, is enormous. At the present time, two principal dialectal divisions exist, Geg or Northern, and Tosk or Southern, which are more or less mutually intelligible. The inhabitants of Albania number one million, and at least another million speakers of the language live in the surrounding countries or across the seas.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/408833.pdf

The Phonetics of Albanian

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The Phonetics of Albanian