Mapping Prosodic Convergence in the Eastern Mediterranean

Throughout history, languages have frequently come into sustained contact with each other as a result of socio-political changes, migration and demographic shift, often creating multilingual societies. In fact, contrary to common conceptions, many communities are multilingual. The effects of contact between languages have been studied for a range of linguistic features, such as changes in vocabulary or variation in individual sounds. English, for example, has been subjected to contact with several languages over time, including Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian languages, and French, the influence of which can be seen in aspects of grammar and pronunciation, and in many inherited words. Studying such differences gives insight into contemporary ethnolinguistic interactions, and has the power to uncover past contact, through traces left in language. However, little is known about the effects of contact on intonation or more generally on prosody, even though this aspect is more prone to change because speakers can disconnect, in their minds, prosody from the matter or shape of words.

In a case study in the city of Nicosia, on the island of Cyprus, we collected and analysed a sample of yes-no ('polar') questions produced by young speakers of Cypriot Greek and Cypriot Turkish and found that they share many elements in their intonation. This is an important finding because it shows that prolonged contact between speakers of languages that are very different in structure, such as Greek and Turkish which belong to different language families, may end up converging with one another in some aspect, in this case creating a kind of prosodic melting pot. We will expand this investigation to a wider area in the Eastern Mediterranean and compare language varieties of Greek, Turkish, Italian, Croatian and Arabic as spoken in Cyprus, and coastal areas of Greece and Croatia, with mainland/inland equivalents, using audio recordings to investigate how geographical location and time...