I was pleased to learn, via a thread at Tenser, said the Tensor, that a lack of fricatives or affricates is “virtually universal for all Australian languages, of all families.” Furthermore, the phenomenon is almost entirely limited to Australia and the adjacent regions; the list given by The Tensor (created from the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database) has only two outliers (AUCA: S. American, Andean; DINKA: Nilo-Saharan, Eastern Sudanic, Nilotic, Dinka-Nuer); as he says, “That’s an areal feature if I’ve ever seen one.” And yet another rebuttal to the universalists (who used to claim that all languages have fricatives).
For some more information about Australian languages, check out this page for some more details. The phonology of Australian languages is very interesting, with 6 way nasal distinctions and no voicing contrast. One wonders what our theories of phonology would look like if we hadn’t lost so many of them…
Sign language must have come as a bit of shock, then?
Some Australian languages have fricatives. Kala Lagaw Ya has the word kwasarr for 2 (
the list given by The Tensor
To be precise, Tensor queried UPSID for languages without *sibilants*, not languages without fricatives or affricates. UPSID can still be queried today through a web interface, and the answers to those questions overlap a lot, but not completely. Some languages have fricatives but only non-sibilant ones (for some of them, like Hawaiian, the only fricative is /h/, if you count that as a fricative). And some have the sibilant affricate /t͡ʃ/ but no fricatives.
WALS has a map of Absence of Common Consonants: bilabials, fricatives, and nasals. Caution: a few languages don’t have fricatives but do have affricates as just mentioned, and WALS can’t filter those out for you, you have to dig for that information elsewhere.
Also caution: some languages have fricatives and stops as allophones of each other, like the b in Spanish. Do they count as having no fricatives? Depends on which one gets chosen to label the phoneme. In the name of the Australian language Martuthinira, the spelling “th” represents [ð], an allophone of the dental stop, but WALS counts this language as having no fricatives.
As the map shows, there are also a handful of no-fricative languages in South America.
Claire (2004): Some Australian languages have fricatives.
And Claire has continued to push back on over-generalizations about Australian languages ever since. Her Standard Average Australian tested a lot of claims about “common” or “typical” Australian features and found that about half of them were either wrong or unverifiable. The claim about not having fricatives isn’t wrong, but “virtually universal” and “almost entirely limited to Australia” are a bit overstated. There’s a map showing a dozen or so Australian languages that have phonemic stop/fricative distinctions, vs. 8-10 times that many that don’t, in “Revisiting Phonological Generalizations in Australian Languages” by Emily Gasser and Claire Bowern (2014).
I couldn’t find anything about how many languages might have fricatives as allophones of stops, but since Claire didn’t make a point about that, I guess it isn’t too common. Australian Kriol is said to replace fricatives with stops in English-source words, because of substrate phonology.
Seems a little ironic to quote a “virtually universal” claim as a *rebuttal* to universalism — shouldn’t universalism be suspect on the scale of Australia, too?
(Not that I have any expertise here. If I’ve misunderstood something, this is the place to find out.)
William Foley describes Yimas without any fricative phonemes, though he says that “younger speakers” (as of 1991) have the allophone [s] of /c/ between vowels.
Dinka is by no means the only Western Nilotic language that lacks fricatives; so does its close relative Nuer, and the less-close Anywa, Luwo and Lango, for example.
The other interesting thing about fricatives in Australia is that when languages do have fricatives, sibilants are still absent, so [θ] is more common than [s]. This has been blamed on widespread middle-ear infections that prevent people from hearing high frequencies.
It’s Pama-Nyungan, but most of its words (and further parts of its phonology) are from overseas, so is verb number morphology, and its system of personal pronouns looks like a calque of Tok Pisin – native roots remixed and used to fill in a Papuan grid (without a trial number, though).
This has been blamed on widespread middle-ear infections that prevent people from hearing high frequencies.
Children, specifically.
It makes perfect sense from the viewpoint of infection prevalence and acoustics, and yet, I find it hard to believe.
Indeed: Anelisa Fergus’s Lend Me Your Ears: Otitis Media and Aboriginal Australian languages, a 2019 paper (thesis?), supervised by Claire Bowern, concludes,
Thanks, I’ve downloaded it.
I don’t agree with everything in Fergus’s paper, but my main takes are that the Australian prevalence of Otitis Media is much too low to make a difference (4%; I’d misremembered something like 90%), and that populations with a much higher incidence (Indigenous Alaskans, 30–46%) speak languages with multiple fricative phonemes (including sibilants).
Anelisa Fergus’s Lend Me Your Ears: Otitis Media and Aboriginal Australian languages
Updated link to the Yale BA senior essays page, where this paper can be found.
Y: “the Australian prevalence of Otitis Media is much too low to make a difference (4%; I’d misremembered something like 90%)”
Where did you get 4%? Fergus’s Table 12 gives 12–33% for Australian Aborigines, citing a WHO report. The Australian podcast Because Language has an episode with a speech pathologist as guest host, who cites a statistic that “43% of Australian indigenous children have some form of hearing loss or impairment”, but the podcast and source don’t claim anything about fricatives.
Conversely, Dinka and Lango are discussed by Fergus as languages that don’t have fricatives, but also don’t have a notably high rate of otitis media.
You’re right, I’d misread it.
Zui at The Language Closet has been digging into the details of this recently:
Talking about otitis media (September 28, 2024): reviews a great many epidemiological studies. There’s no question that ear infections and resulting hearing damage are a severe problem *now* among Indigenous Australian children, with rates probably the highest in the world (with regional variation, of course): one study from 2005 found a prevalence of otitis media of 90% in Northern Territory, maybe that’s what Y remembered. But nobody knows how long this has been true. The epidemiological surveys are almost all from the 1990s or later — I wonder whether these children were learning their ancestral languages in the first place.
The Australian languages with fricatives (November 9, 2024), several small clusters of them.
Zui promises further posts evaluating Butcher’s arguments.
…and confirms that Kala Lagaw Ya, the one with influence from across the sea, is the only one with [s] or even [z]. Otitis media is supposed to destroy the ability to hear the highest frequencies, and that fits this picture.
We need a media empire called Otitis Media. Deaf to the dogwhistle, I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
Given that burst spectra are a significant cue to the recognition of plosive places of articulation, I wonder if otitis media causes much confusion between, say, [t] and [ʈ].
That’s a strong test, becaues confusion between these two would cause total protonic reversal all across the entire continent.
(That would be bad.)
Right, so the question is, do Australian kids learn to distinguish [t] and [ʈ] from other cues alone, like vowel formant transitions?
The vowel systems are small enough that this might be possible, I guess… but there don’t seem to be any shifts between consonants with similar effects on vowels, e.g. [ʈ] > [tˁ]…
Here’s a story from Dixon’s memoir (see 2006 discussion). It’s 1977, he’s recording the Warrgamay language from a man named Lambert Cocky:
Nothing wrong with that guy’s ears, then!
(If I understand correctly, the IPA symbol for voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is belted l [ɬ], not l with tilde [ɫ], but the latter is what’s printed in the book. I’m guessing that was the printer’s limitation.)
Is there any information or even speculation on why prevalence of otitis media might be higher in Australia?
Could also be Americanist notation. Navajo orthography uses ł after all – ɫ was apparently intended but (even) harder to print.
Americanist notation — oh, right, that’s it.
Is there any information or even speculation on why prevalence of otitis media might be higher in Australia?
Besides the obvious (poverty, overcrowding, etc.), there’s just speculation. Butcher, the proponent of the “bad hearing > no fricatives” theory, cites some genetic mutations that have been associated with susceptibility elsewhere, but no one has studied whether indigenous Australians have these mutations. Alternately, Bhutta (2015) suggests that Europeans “exposed them to new strains of bacteria to which their immune system had not evolved immunity, perturbing a previously stable host-pathogen coevolutionary state.”
Butcher’s most complete paper is The special nature of Australian phonologies (2019). Since his theory needs ear infections to have been common for a very long time, Butcher leans hard on a quotation from a surgeon in the First Fleet in 1788, who wrote (four months after arrival) that he wasn’t tempted by the women because of “the constant Appearance of the excrementitious Matters of the Nose which is collected on the upper pouting Lip, in rich Clusters of dry Bubbles, and is kept up by fresh Drippings”. He then claims “a number of later accounts of first contact with people still leading the nomadic life suggesting widespread chronic ear infection has a long history in Aboriginal Australia”, but this is misleading: what he actually quotes in his 2015 paper are accounts from “the early days at Ernabella”, a missionary station established in 1937, and he doesn’t say when exactly these accounts are from. That’s hardly “first contact”.
So Butcher really does think that they were already chronically sick before colonization. In support of the opposite view, that they were sickened (much more severely/chronically than before) by colonization, Australian Indigenous Health Bulletin cites a 1982 book: “In the 1960s a high incidence of chronic otitis media was observed shortly after the Pintupi people emerged from the Western Desert and started living in artificially constructed communities [6]. A Pintupi elder was reported as referring to that time as ‘when the pus started coming out of the kids’ ears’ (p9-10) [6].”
Argh.
Australia is also unusually rich in sign languages (previously at Language Hat: Yolngu Sign Language, just one of many). Wikipedia: “Many Australian Aboriginal cultures have or traditionally had a manually coded language, a signed counterpart of their oral language. This appears to be connected with various speech taboos between certain kin or at particular times, such as during a mourning period for women or during initiation ceremonies for men, as was also the case with Caucasian Sign Language but not Plains Indian Sign Language, which did not involve speech taboo, or deaf sign languages, which are not encodings of oral language.”
Butcher (2015) interprets this as another indication that the people were already hearing-impaired before contact. On the other hand, hearing problems don’t seem to be relevant to the Caucasian or Plains Indian cases.
Mother-in-law speech taboos existed also in California, among other places. Frank Latta relates the following, from the early 20th century, in his Handbook of Yokuts Indians:
Great story!