Professor Elinor Payne (PI) and Dr Mary Baltazani (CI) have been awarded a major ESRC Research Grant for their project Mapping Prosodic Convergence in the Eastern Mediterranean, together with Dr Spyros Armostis (CI) of the University of Cyprus.

Throughout history, languages have frequently come into sustained contact as a result of socio-political change, migration and demographic shift, often resulting in complex multilingual scenarios. While language contact effects have been studied for many linguistic features, little is known about effects on prosody, even though prosody is arguably more susceptible to contact influence because speakers can more easily disconnect it, in their minds, from the matter or shape of words.

Informed by the results of a John Fell pilot investigating Cypriot varieties of Greek, Turkish and Arabic (https://mappingprosody.phon.ox.ac.uk/), our 3-year project will search for prosodic contact ‘residue’ across the wider Eastern Mediterranean. As well as Cyprus, we focus on islands and coastal areas of the Adriatic, Ionian and Aegean Seas (especially Greece, Italy and Croatia), examining the influence of contact with Turkish and Venetian, be that historical (under the long wax and wane of the competing forces of the Ottoman Empire and Venetian Republic) or residual pockets of multilingualism today.

We combine acoustic analysis, state-of-the-art statistical-mathematical modelling, and perceptual experiments to compare original, geo-referenced recordings from across the area, and map out patterns of convergence and variation on a digital-audio atlas. At the heart of our research is understanding a range of factors that may promote and constrain variation, including demographic, topographical and linguistic-typological. The digital atlas will act as a multi-disciplinary platform for exploring the extent to which geohistorical factors (e.g. population displacements) and spatial-topographical factors (e.g. distance and possible ‘island’ effects) underpin the patterns we find.

By examining 11+ language varieties across 3 major language families (Indo-European, Turkic, Afro-Asiatic) we will investigate whether prosodic convergence is constrained by typological incompatibilities, or whether, for example, intonational tunes are ‘deaf’ to fundamental grammatical differences (e.g. SVO vs SOV; stress vs pitch accent). These questions have far-reaching implications for how listeners process intonation and its integration with other aspects of language, and for theories of linguistic universals and naturalness.