Affricates in the spontaneous speech of Aromanians in Turia

Abstract

This paper deals with the affricate inventory of Aromanian spontaneous speech, using the spoken materials collected in Turia (Greece) in 2002 for the Small Dialectological Atlas of the Balkan Languages. The purpose is to analyse the affricates present in the Turia Aromanian dialect and their development. The texts, which had been previously put down in Romanian-based Aromanian orthography with the help of a native Aromanian speaker, were transcribed using computer programs Sound Forge and Speech Analyzer. The instrumental analysis shows that there are eight affricates to be found in our materials: [t͡s], [d͡z], [t͡’s’], [d͡’z’], [t͡ʃ], [d͡ʒ], [t͡ɕ], and [d͡ʑ]. However, there is evidence of these sounds – most notably [t͡s] and [d͡z] – being in the process of losing their stop phase. On the other hand, there are also instances of an opposite process, namely a fricative phase appearing after [t]. Both processes are fairly well-known typologically and among the Indo-European languages, but there has been previously little to no research on affricate development in Aromanian.