Doctoral Dissertation Research: Yazgulyami Syllable Structure [yah]

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Yazgulyami is a severely endangered Pamiri (Southeastern Iranian) language, spoken primarily along the Yazgulyam River in the mountains of eastern Tajikistan. Recent history has seen the encroachment of Tajik culture and the concomitant death of several neighboring Pamiri languages. This project has two primary aims, one descriptive and one theoretical. Firstly, this work will create a living language corpus of Yazgulyami speech composed of annotated audio and video recordings alongside a multilingual dictionary. Additionally, this research will examine and formally model the syllabification of consonant clusters. In Yazgulyami, up to three consonants may begin a word. Previous work on the language suggests that these clusters may be polysyllabic, creating syllables composed entirely on consonants, like pt and zv. If this is the case, Yazgulyami is one of the very few languages that allow vowel-less syllables. Languages like this raise the question of what makes up a syllable, an important empirical question. In pursuit of these two goals, speech data will be collected from a Yazgulyami village in eastern Tajikistan. A variety of stories, conversations, and songs will be recorded, including poetry and language games, which will supplement acoustic analysis of word-initial syllables. Poetry and language games (e.g. Pig Latin) often refer to syllables, giving the researcher an opportunity to access native speaker conceptions of syllable boundaries. Empirical findings from this study will be formalized according to contemporary phonetic and phonological theory, addressing the underlying as well as surface realization of these syllabic structures.This project will provide a needed documentation of a swiftly changing language in an understudied region of the world. Moreover, the project will enable a graduate student to collaborate with an endangered speech community on the description of their language while producing a theoretical analysis of a rarely attested sound pattern.