PHONETIC AND PHONOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGES: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

Aided by technological and theoretical advancements, the past century has witnessed a dramatic expansion in our knowledge of the phonetic and phonological properties of Native American languages. This research program, which is prominently featured in publications appearing in IJAL and elsewhere, has played a pivotal role in furthering our knowledge of the diversity of the sound patterns found in languages of the world and contributing to the development of theories of speech articulation, perception, and cognition. This paper provides an overview of research on phonetic and phonological features of Native American languages from the early part of the twentieth century to the present. Studies of North, Central, and South American languages are discussed with a particular focus on languages of the Southeastern United States, which have been the subject of seminal research on many properties, including stress, tone, intonation, and phonetic and phonological obsolescence.