The 2025-2026 Linguistics Colloquium series continues on Monday, September 29, with a talk by Florian Lionnet (Princeton). The talk will take place in Dwinelle 370 and synchronously via Zoom from 3:10-4:30pm. The title is "Areal alignment and the phonological diversification of Bua languages (Chad)" and the abstract is as follows:
Bua languages (Niger-Congo) form a relatively compact group of 10 languages spoken by small communities in southern Chad. The group is split into two noticeably different branches: Riverine languages along the Middle Chari River, and Inland languages further east. Comparative data shows that proto-Bua had a vowel system characterized by an ATR contrast and ATR harmony, three contrastive plosive series (voiceless, voiced, implosive), and a two-tone system.
In this talk, I show how Riverine languages lost the ATR contrast, reinterpreted ATR harmony as height harmony, developed interior vowels, enriched the plosive system with a series of prenasalized consonants, and innovated a third tone. I also show that Inland languages, on the other hand, maintained the proto-Bua ATR contrast and harmony, but drastically simplified the three-way plosive contrast, to the point of having no laryngeal contrast at all in some languages.
I argue that the changes that took place in Riverine Bua languages are the result of areal alignment, that is, a historical alignment of their sound systems to the phonological profile found in the Middle Chari area where they are spoken, and more generally in the Central African linguistic area. This alignment was made possible by the language ecology in which these languages are spoken, an ecology characterized by egalitarian multilingualism. The characteristics of the Inland phonological systems, on the other hand, cannot be attributed to the influence of any areal signal.
