Historical sound changes in Central Chadic (Afroasiatic)

Abstract

In its entirety as much as with regard to its four branches, the Chadic language family poses challenges to the application of the Neogrammarian-school comparative method, not the least because of the immense time-depth involved and aggravated by certain typological peculiarities of Chadic phonology and morphology as inherited from its Afroasiatic ancestry. This is particularly true for Central Chadic, which—with 80 languages—is the most numerous and most diverse branch of Chadic, which in total counts almost 200 languages and thereby more than half of all known Afroasiatic languages. Both more or less ‘regular’ and ‘sporadic’ sound changes criss-cross the territories currently occupied by speakers of Central Chadic languages in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad, which allow confident identification of cognates. Some cognates have survived many millennia of language history practically unchanged with regard to their phonetic realisations, while others differ remarkably from the reconstructed proto-language forms beyond ad hoc recognisability. Recent historical comparative research by Richard Gravina (2014, 2015) and the present author (2022, 2023) involving 66 spoken languages and some 230 cognate lexical items have unearthed much of the linguistic histories behind the massive synchronic diversity of the modern Central Chadic languages. The recent research by the author has added to our understanding of historical Central Chadic phonology by unravelling the phonological processes by which the languages have developed sets of new phonemes, in addition to tracing more or less ‘regular’ and ‘sporadic’ sound changes that the PCC segmental inventories of vowels and consonants underwent. Modern Central Chadic languages show sets of innovative vowels and consonant whose emergence can largely be attributed, besides occasional instances of segmental fusion, to the ‘colouring’ effects of so-called prosodies. This makes the analysis of prosodic features such as palatalisation, labialisation, prenasalisation and glottalisation essential in order to understand the evolution of modern Central Chadic languages.