Doctoral Dissertation Research: Vowel Harmony in Maasai

University Of Iowa, Iowa City IA

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation research project will investigate vowel harmony in Maasai, an Eastern Nilotic language with a million speakers in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. In a language with vowel harmony, some or all vowels in a word must share a particular characteristic, so certain types of vowels may not occur together in the same word. In Maasai, most words are pronounced either with the tongue root advanced for all vowels or retracted for all vowels. Vowel harmony is found in many languages, including Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, Igbo, and Mongolian. Studying vowel harmony in Maasai is important for several reasons. First, little work has been done on Maasai; all of the current analyses of Maasai vowel harmony depend on the same set of data from the 1950s. Second, vowel harmony in Maasai is extremely complex, and includes intricacies not found in any other language. Previous descriptions are inadequate, and none of the data are based on acoustic analysis. This project will fill that gap. The student investigator will record Maasai speakers in Tanzania in order to check the accuracy of data that have been reported in the literature, to provide new data, to perform acoustic analysis of the data, to present a phonological analysis of the data, and to make the data available to the wider linguistic community for further research. Careful analysis of such a complicated phonological system provides linguists with insights about the possible types of complex sound systems that humans are capable of learning.