The Sounds of Judeo-Malayalam
A look at what Judeo-Malayalam sounds like and the tools linguists use to explore the sounds of language.
Judeo-Malayalam is the language of the Cochin Jews and is spoken mainly in Southern India and Israel. It’s a South Dravidian language, closely related to Malayalam in its grammar, and it’s considered endangered because there are less than 50 speakers estimated to still speak the language today. A language such as this should be focal in language revitalisation efforts such as documentation; it’s at-risk and, as all languages do, it captures the long history and culture of its speakers. Thus, through a linguistic perspective, this article will explore the sound system of Judeo-Malayalam, explain what makes it special, and along the way introduce you to linguistic methods and the importance of linguistic work.
Why are the sounds of a language so important?
All spoken languages have linguistically relevant sounds necessary to say a word. Think about the most common word in English, “the”: you have a “th” sound that’s made by putting your tongue against your top row of teeth and pushing air through the gap; it’s turbulent. You add voicing to this sound as well by vibrating your vocal folds. This sound is found in many words in English, such as “that”, “than”, and “weather”. You then have an “e” sound which is the most “neutral” sound you can make with your mouth: your mouth is open comfortably, your tongue is rested, and you are just letting voiced air flow out of your mouth. This sound is called “schwa” and it is one of the most common linguistic sounds in the world given how “neutral” its production is. In English, you see it at the end of words such as “centre” and the beginning of words like “upon”, and “among”.
Notice here how sounds are not always represented by the same written letters every time: our “schwa” vowel is represented by an “e” in “the”, “re” in centre”, “u” in “upon”, and “a” in amongst. To avoid having to list so many different letters where a sound occurs, linguists do not use written words and letters to represent the sounds of a language; they use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This is a series of symbols that represent sounds, not letters, and thus avoids this confusing mismatch between written letters and sounds. Turning back to “the”, that “th” sound is represented by the symbol /ð/ and the “schwa” sound is represented by the symbol /ə/. The words with schwa are therefore transcribed as /ˈðə/ for “the”, /ˈsɛntə/ for “centre”, /əˈpɒn/ for “upon”, and /əˈmʌŋ/ for “among”. As you can see, we no longer have different written symbols representing the same sound; we have just one symbol, /ə/.
Studying the sounds of a language like this is critical to linguistic research and the IPA is the optimum tool for this task. The IPA lists every possible linguistic sound a language could have, but not every language uses all of those sounds. For example, in the IPA there are 28 different vowels sounds but English only uses 14 and Spanish only 5. The sounds that are and aren’t possible in a language are a part of that language’s identity; not every language has a unique combination of linguistically relevant sounds but studying the language’s inventory of these sounds can highlight similarities and differences between different, related languages that show their relation to and individuality from each other. As far as we know, Judeo-Malayalam has never had its sound inventory investigated; no one knows what its sound inventory is or how individual it is from its closest languages, Malayalam or Hebrew. However, through the use of a specially-designed wordlist of 400 words for investigating the sounds of any language and through close work with Thapan, a native speaker of Judeo-Malayalam, its sound system has finally been documented for the first time.
The Sound Inventory of Judeo-Malayalam
The consonants of Judeo-Malayalam, laid out in the IPA format, are:
Now, for some explanation of what’s going on here: along the top are what we call “places of articulation”: they are the spots in your mouth which either your bottom lip or an area of your tongue touches to make a sound. These are:
- Bilabial, where the bottom lip touches the top lip. Like the “b” sound in “ball”.
- Labio-dental, where the bottom lip touches the top row of teeth. Like the “v” sound in “volleyball”.
- Dental, where the tip of the tongue tongues the top row of teeth. Like the “th” sound in “the”.
- Alveolar, where the tip of the tongue touches the hard ridge just behind your top row of teeth. Like the “d” sound in “dynamite”.
- Post-alveolar, where the front of the tongue touches the space just behind the alveolar ridge. Like the “sh” sound in “shark”.
- Retroflex, where you curl your tongue backwards and the tip of the underside of your tongue touches the alveolar ridge. Indian accents of English use these regularly instead of alveolar sounds.
- Palatal, where the body of your tongue touches the hard palate in the middle of your mouth. Like the “y” sound in “yellow”.
- Velar, where the back of your tongue touches the soft palate at the back of your mouth. Like the “g” sound in “go”.
- Glottal, where the very back of your tongue touches the very back of your throat. Like the “h” sound in “horse”.
As you may have noticed, these go from the front of the mouth to the back of the mouth; the table itself sort-of represents the inside of your mouth (lips to the left, throat to the right). Along the side are now what we call the “manners of articulation”, and these are the types of sound you can make with your mouth. Like the top of the table, this also represents the mouth somewhat: the top of the rows involves the lips/tongue making hard, complete closures with an area of the mouth; the bottom is more open and looser.
- Plosive: these are complete closures where air pressure builds up (it cannot escape) and explodes outwards, like the “p” sound in “pin”.
- Nasals: these are complete closures again but instead of the air pressure building up and escaping, it is redirected out of the nose, like the “n” sound in “nasal”.
- Trills: these are also complete closures but instead of pressure building up, the articulator slaps against the other lightly and repeatedly. These aren’t in English but they are in languages like Spanish.
- Taps: these are the same as trills except there is only one light slap. These also aren’t in English.
- Fricative: the closure here isn’t complete; it’s really tight and lets turbulent air through, like the “f” sound in “found”.
- Affricate: these are a combination of a plosive and a fricative together, like the “ch” sound in “chart”.
- Approximant: these are even more open with the articulators coming close enough for air to pass through unimpeded, like the “y” sound in “yes”.
- Lateral approximant: these are the same as approximants but the air comes out the sides of the tongue, not the centre, like the “l” sound in “lounge”.
The final information displayed here relates to voicing: in principle, the sounds on the left are unvoiced (your vocal folds don’t vibrate, like the “f” in “fly”) and the sounds on the right are voiced (when you vibrate your vocal sounds when producing that “f” sound, you get the “v” sound in “van”; the place and manner of articulation hasn’t changed). With the consonant inventory collected and completed, let’s move onto the vowels, which can also be represented with an IPA chart:
To briefly explain this table, the top again refers to the place in the mouth:
- Front: these are sounds right at the front of the mouth, like the “ee” sound in “eagle”.
- Near-front: these are sounds near the front of the mouth, like the “i” sound in “igloo”.
- Central: these are sounds in the middle of the mouth, like “schwa”.
- Near-back: These are sounds near the back of the mouth, like the “uh” sound in “cup”.
- Back: Thea re sounds right at the back of the mouth, like the “o” sound in “bot”.
Similarly, the rows relate to how closed or open the gap between your tongue and the top of your mouth is. This isn’t like the consonants, however: close here is still more open than even the approximants were, they’re just closer than a full opening.
- Close: a relatively tight gap, like the “ee” sound in “eagle”.
- Near-close: a slightly more open gap, like the “i” sound in “igloo”.
- Close-mid: an even more open gap, like the “e” in “air”.
- Mid: a neutral opening in the mouth, required to make “schwa”.
- Open-mid: more open than the neutral opening, like the “e” in “end”.
- Open: a fully open sound, like the “o” in “bot”.
The last things to note here is that the sounds on the left are made with the lips unrounded; those on the right are made with the lips rounded. Furthermore, languages don’t just have singular vowels: sometimes they can be lengthened and sometimes multiple vowels can occur together, called diphthongs. In English, an example of this would be “eye”, with an “a” and an “i” sound co-occuring. All of these vowels can be lengthened and the following are the diphthongs found in Judeo-Malayalam:
- /eɪ/
- /əʊ/
- /ʊɛ/
- /ɪʌ/
- /aɪ
- /ia/
- /ɛɪ/
- /aʌ/
- /ua/
- /iɔ/
- /iə/
- /iʊ/
- /aʊ/
- /ai/
- /iɛ/
So What?
There we have it; the full sound system of Judeo-Malayalam presented as a whirlwind tour of the IPA, the most useful tool for this job. Now we ask ourselves, what did we do that for? Beyond simply documenting the sounds of the language, what can we actually do with this information? Well, the first thing we can do is explore the interesting gaps and symmetries in Judeo-Malayalam. Starting with the consonants, here are some of the linguistically fascinating things we can see in Judeo-Malayalam:
- In the plosives, there is a near-symmetry between the bilabial, alveolar, retroflex, and velar sounds: they all contain at least a voiceless plosive, voiceless aspirated plosive, and a voiced plosive. It’s a near-symmetry because there are gaps: there are voiceless aspirated plosive geminates (longer versions of this sound) that only occur at bilabial, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation, there are voiceless palatalised aspirated plosives that only occur at alveolar and velar places of articulation, and there are breathy-voiced plosives that only occur at alveolar and velar places of articulation. Palatal and glottal plosives do not share these symmetries either, but they were uncommon in the data.
- The nasals and plosives are symmetrical in place of articulation and, at every place, there is always a pair of a nasal and a geminate of that nasal.
- Par /ⱱ/, there is a voicing pair at the same place of articulation for taps and trills.
- For fricatives, voicing pairs only occur at labio-dental and dental sounds; further back, only voiceless fricatives exist (with a geminate of /s/).
- Affricates at both places of articulation have a voicing pair.
- There are also an equal number of approximants and lateral approximants but they occur at different places of articulation in different frequencies.
Its consonants are therefore interestingly symmetrical. It is, of course, possible that these gaps and symmetries findings may be changed by more data: some of these findings were based on rarities in the data and more may exist in words that were not included in the wordlist. But as it stands, these are still very interesting linguistic properties of Judeo-Malayalam and the door is open for more researchers to refine and add to this now. Turning now to the vowels, these are equally quite symmetrical:
- There are the same amount of front unrounded vowels as there are back rounded vowels and they are occur at the same degrees of closeness.
- By place, there is a near-symmetry across the table: with the exception of the two back unrounded vowels, Judeo-Malayalam has the same number of central, near-front and back, and front and back vowels.
These are findings that are internal to the language and they are the kinds of interesting observations linguists explore in all of the world’s languages. But what else can we do? Well, at the start of this article we said we could use the IPA to compare a language to its related languages, and that’s what we can do now. Looking first at Malayalam, specifically the Namboodiri variety, its full sound system has already been documented. Starting with consonants, this is the complete IPA:
As we can immediately see, there are quite a lot of parallels here: the same plosives were found at most of the same places (they omit geminates here but found them too), the same nasals were also found at the same places, and most of the same taps, trills, fricatives, and approximants were found. This is to be somewhat expected; Judeo-Malayalam is traditionally thought of as a Jewish language variant of Malayalam, after all. However, it does have some significant differences that highlight the independence of Judeo-Malayalam:
- No breathy-voiced bilabial or retroflex plosives were found in Judeo-Malayalam (though this again could be due to data limitations).
- Palatal and glottal plosives were found in Judeo-Malayalam that are not in Malayalam.
- Voiceless taps and trills were found in Judeo-Malayalam that are not in Malayalam.
- Voiced labio-dental fricatives, dental fricatives, post-alveolar fricatives, and palatal fricatives were found in Judeo-Malayalam that are not in Malayalam whilst retroflex fricatives were found in Malayalam but not Judeo-Malayalam.
- More post-alveolar affricates exist in Judeo-Malayalam.
- Alveolar approximants exist in Judeo-Malayalam.
Phonetically, therefore, it might be reductive to say that Judeo-Malayalam is just a variety of another language; its consonants have some uniqueness. Looking at the vowels, Judeo-Malayalam also has significantly more than Malayalam:
As seen, Judeo-Malayalam actually has more vowels than Malayalam, having 15 whilst Malayalam has 5, and it has far more diphthongs: 15 were found in Judeo-Malayalam whilst 4 were found in Malayalam. Specifically, more central and more open vowels exist in Judeo-Malayalam.
We can also look at Hebrew’s sound system to either account for these differences or further highlight the uniqueness of Judeo-Malayalam. Here is Hebrew’s consonant inventory:
As seen, the Hebrew consonant inventory can actually account for some of the sound found in Judeo-Malayalam that were not present in Malayalam:
- The glottal plosive found in Judeo-Malayalam may be an influence of Hebrew.
- The voiced labio-dental fricative may be an influence of Hebrew.
- The post-alveolar fricative my be an influence of Hebrew.
- The post-alveolar affricates may be an influence of Hebrew.
However, Judeo-Malayalam must be more than just a “hodge-podge” of these two languages because there are still sounds found in Judeo-Malayalam that are not found in Hebrew either:
- The palatal plosive is unique to Judeo-Malayalam.
- The voiceless taps and trills are unique to Judeo-Malayalam.
- The dental fricatives are unique to Judeo-Malayalam.
- The palatal fricative is unique to Judeo-Malayalam.
- The alveolar approximant is unique to Judeo-Malayalam.
Interestingly this vowel inventory for Hebrew is the same as the inventory for Malayalam and they found no diphthongs. Thus, none of Judeo-Malayalam’s unique properties from Malayalam can be explained by Hebrew, either. The other unique property of Judeo-Malayalam found in the data is vowel continuum: this is where diphthongs and singular vowels (monophthongs) “blur” together, sounding almost like three vowels together. This is already known to be a unique property of Judeo-Malayalam from Malayalam and Hebrew. Judeo-Malayalam therefore has unique phonetic properties and its uniqueness shows its independence: it has developed its own features, likely through its own history of socio-cultural influences, that make it stand as its own language. It is also possible that the identified features are unique to the speaker interviewed, but as it stands the data still highlights the uniqueness of the language’s speakers.
To Summarise
By now, not only have you had a crash course in linguistic theory and methods, you’ve seen what we can do with linguistics using Judeo-Malayalam as a case study. We have not only used speakers and the IPA to create a full sound system for Judeo-Malayalam, we’ve highlighted the interesting findings we can see in there and then we have shown that the language, based on phonetic data, is more than just a variety of Malayalam; it has taken some influences from Hebrew, sure, but it has many unique phonetic qualities that make it its own unique language.
