Please join us for a meeting of the Language Variation & Change workshop, next Friday, April 12 at 3:30pm, in Rosenwald 301. Please see below for our other talks this quarter.

Minor languages of Balochistan & Sindh, with special reference to the Brahui language and its phonetics and phonology
Saeed Ahmed Lehri, University of Balochistan

In this presentation, I will introduce the minor languages of Balochistan and Sindh provinces of Pakistan. However, I will mainly discuss my mother tongue: Brahui, which is an endangered non-Indo-European language. I will give an overview of the characteristics of Brahui (vocabulary, orthography, sounds and sound change, inflection, word order, dialects). My main focus is sounds and sound change. I will also talk briefly about inflection, the plural morpheme, morphophonemic changes, and the formation of adjectives from nouns. Additionally, I will discuss word order, question formation, articles, and postpositions. In connection with sound change, I will describe elision and assimilation. I will also talk about weak and strong forms of pronunciation. Further, I will discuss stress and intonation patterns and rhythm (loudness, length, speeding up, slowing down and silence). I will also discuss how Brahui speakers are themselves contributing to the endangerment of their native language and what can be done to reverse this.

Week 3 (4/19): Sali Tagliamonte (Toronto)
Week 4 (4/26): Marlyse Baptista (Michigan)
Week 5 (5/3): Hannah McElgunn (UChicago)
Week 6 (5/10): no meeting
Week 7 (5/17): CLS 55
Week 8 (5/24): Daniel Lam (UChicago)