Language Contact in Kera (Chadic)

This paper examines the effect on Kera speakers of contact with French, Tupuri, and Arabic. Kera is an Eastern Chadic language spoken by 50,000 speakers in Chad and Cameroon. (Ebert 1979, Pearce 2005, 2006a,b, 2008, 2009). The main areas of interest are the effects of French voicing on the Voice Onset Time (VOT) and tone, the phonological structure changes that occur between town speakers and village speakers, using evidence from production and perception experiments, the changes from a 3-way tonal contrast to a 2-tone and voicing contrast, gender differences, and loss of tone. We will consider phonological issues such as the point along the phonetic continuum from village to town at which the phonological grammar changes, and what grammar is used by those who move to town as teenagers. We will also look at sociolinguistic issues such as the fact that village women are more conservative than village men, while the women in town are the most ready to accept the changes arising from language contact. We will consider the evidence from acoustic phonetics, which shows that both languages (L1 and L2) are affected by the language contact. Although Chadian French has a VOT contrast and no tonal contrast, the VOT and pitch in Chadian French, when spoken by a Kera speaker, vary according to Kera values. And yet Kera speakers maintain distinct phonetic settings for the two languages. When Kera speakers speak French, they use Kera phonetic vowels. The duration of the vowel, the amount of reduction and the orthography all play a role on the vowel quality produced by the Kera speaker. Finally, in loan words, the tone patterns, voicing and vowel quality of Tupuri, Arabic and French all have an influence.