Abstract:

Being used by multilingual individuals and in multilingual contexts for more than half a millennium, all present-day varieties of Judeo-Spanish show characteristics that evidence cross-linguistic influence from the respective surrounding languages. Judeo-Spanish vowel systems, for instance, often mirror specific features of the vowel systems of their contact languages. The present contribution presents a spectral and auditory analysis of unstressed vowels in a small corpus of Istanbul Judeo-Spanish semi-spontaneous speech. It is shown that some unstressed vowels display alternations that can be explained by partial transfer of vowel harmony from the surrounding language Turkish. Nonetheless, the transfer of this phonological process seems to be inhibited by the high functional load unstressed word-final vowels bear in Judeo-Spanish, i.e., the rules of Turkish vowel harmony would negatively interfere with Judeo-Spanish nominal morphology. We assume that for this reason, vowel-harmonic alternations occur only to a limited extent in Istanbul Judeo-Spanish.