The day after I got back from Butare, I did not do all that much; I went into town to get tissues and candy, and I spent some time at home listening to the recordings I had made. I will have to analyze them in more detail when I get home, but I noticed a couple of things on the first listen:
One of my subjects was born in Burundi, which might make her irrelevant to my study or might mean she provides an interesting counterpoint—or both. Kirundi, the language spoken in Burundi, is mutually intelligible with Kinyarwanda, and the two are really dialects of the same language; the major difference is in the tones, which I will examine later. I did notice that this individual lenited all of her bilabial plosives; that is, b came out as a [β], like a v but with both lips, and p came out as [ɸ], like an f but with both lips. Kinyarwanda has the same rule, but it only works on the b and not on the p; I thought that was interesting.
The other subject—yep, thanks for reminding me I only have two—was born around Butare, and what I noticed most about his speech was the deletion of nasals before fricatives. I don’t expect most people to understand this with so little explanation, but here goes: Historically, Kinyarwanda lost nasal consonants before fricatives, so *inshami became ishami, *imfí became ifí, etc., and this led to some grammatical reinterpretation. Generally, that rule is no longer productive. Another rule, which is still productive, deaffricates affricates after nasals, so incuti is pronounced inshuti, impfíizi as imfíizi, etc. This rule historically would have counterfed the previous one. In my subject here, though, both appeared to still be productive, but in the opposite order, so he pronounced incuti as ishuti, impfíizi as ifíizi, etc.
On Sunday, I got some of people around where I am staying to read my wordlist. (By some, I mean three.) One of them was born in Kigali, one in rural Kigali province and the third in Mugambazi, Northern Province. (I do not think there is any reason not to share that, as long as I do not give more information about them.) So, though my sample-size is currently minuscule, I have managed to get five people born in five substantially different places, and representing both genders and a good range of ages. (Now I’m going to stop parenthesizing every other sentence.)
Examining the data, I did not notice anything really out of the ordinary. If I try to continue this research in the future, I think I will adjust my wordlist to better illustrate different possible tone-patterns in Kinyarwanda. It does the job now, but it could be a lot better: I have phonetics software that can detect and graph pitch in speech, but only through sonorant sounds like vowels and nasal consonants. So áméenyo is a great word to illustrate tones, and the software shows a beautiful, continuous line; ínshííshî, however, gives a graph that is broken during the two fricative sh segments, and thus does not return as enlightening a representation of the overall melody.
I have not listened extremely carefully to, well, any of my interviews, but I think these three were not too out of the ordinary: administrative Kigali City and the nearer parts of the Northern Province are well within the range of the standard dialect of Kinyarwanda. I am hoping to get another couple of locations sampled in the coming days, but time is short and trips take planning!
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