Guest lecture: Acoustic phonetic research in Hawaiian: Opportunities and challenges
Date / Time
April 23, 2025
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
Categories
Thomas Kettig, assistant professor in the department of languages, literatures, and linguistics at York University in Toronto, presents “Acoustic phonetic research in Hawaiian: Opportunities and challenges.”
Kettig’s research investigates how speech sounds vary and evolve across different regions and historical periods, drawing insights from multiple interconnected fields, including endangered language documentation, sociolinguistic variation, historical linguistics, theoretical phonology and quantitative experimental methods. Kettig also employs advanced articulatory and acoustic phonetic techniques to deepen our understanding of linguistic sound systems and their transformations over time.
This talk will address the sounds of Hawaiian, an actively revitalizing Polynesian language. Kettig’s analysis of “traditional” pre-revitalization Hawaiian vowel pronunciation has so far focused on a sample of eight elders interviewed on the Ka Leo Hawaiʻi radio show in the 1970s, enabling a description of overall phonetic patterns and the initial identification of within- and between-speaker structured variation. Kettig presents some results regarding reduction in diphthongs and acoustic cues to lexical stress in monophthongs, along the way highlighting several technical and statistical tools that have helped to address challenges posed by the finite amount of data from native speakers of pre-revitalization dialects. Given the endangered nature of Hawaiian, I also reflect on possible benefits of this research for the burgeoning revitalization movement.
