Demonstratives constitute a distinct pattern to both possessive pronouns and attributive adjectives. The former, like demonstratives, distinguish between dependent and independent forms, although dependent possessives are unlike demonstratives in that they consistently distinguish between singular and plural possessa. Attributive adjectives have an invariant suffix *-e* that distinguishes them from predicative adjectives, which appear in the bare form. In demonstratives, there is no bare form of the *y*-stem and the dependent forms *dey* and *deye* appear in free variation. Given that none of these systems has a precedent in pre-War or Standard varieties of Yiddish it is surprising that Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish has innovated three distinct systems in the realms of attributive adjectives, possessive pronouns, and demonstratives.

The development of a single, uninflected form of the dependent demonstrative, as well as 'vos' speakers' use of a variety of inflected forms, is in line with developments observed in definite determiners (Belk et al. 2020, In press). Additionally, the variety of individual strategies we find in the demonstratives and the overall heterogeneity of the system is consistent with our findings on the personal pronoun and possessive systems in suggesting a system in flux. How this situation will resolve itself is yet to be seen, and a number of questions remain open.

The first regards the apparently free variation between the dependent demonstratives *dey* and *deye*. Further study is required to determine whether their distribution is predictable due to some factor to which our questionnaire was not sensitive. If they are indeed in free variation, this situation may persist; one form might die out in favour of the other (leaving a system more similar to the definite determiners); or the two forms might differentiate into, for example, a singular and a plural form, as appears to be the case with dependent possessives. Similarly, it remains to be seen whether Patterns 2 and 3 will merge, or whether a distinction between *deys* and *dos* will emerge.

There is also the question of how robust Pattern 4 is or, put more generally, the extent to which the 'vos' variety of Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish will remain distinct from the 'vus' variety. Belk et al. (In press) suggests that the loss of morphological case and gender on full nominals happened later among 'vos' speakers as these communities historically mixed less with other communities, but that this loss is nonetheless complete. They argue that the change in the 'vos' variety may have been driven by contact with 'vus' speakers, among whom the innovations in the morphological case and gender system were more established. The same may be true of developments in the demonstrative system, an idea which is supported by the fact that the youngest 'vos' speaker in our study produced some tokens of *deye*, a characteristically 'vus' form.

Finally, given the relative rarity of Pattern 1, we might wonder how long it will persist. As the personal pronoun system seems to crystalise into one that distinguishes nominative from objective forms, at least in the singular, it may be that speakers of Pattern 1 adopt one of the other patterns and thereby develop a nominative/objective distinction in demonstrative pronouns as well.

# **6 Conclusions**

In this chapter we have shown that the Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish pronominal system has undergone a number of innovations vis-à-vis the pre-War and Standard Yiddish varieties. Our results are based on a survey questionnaire which systematically elicited data for the personal pronouns, reflexive pronouns, dependent and independent possessive pronouns, and dependent and independent demonstratives from 29 native speakers of Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish in the main Hasidic centers worldwide (Israel, the New York area, London's Stamford Hill, the Montreal area, and Antwerp). Our findings indicate a system in flux, with a high degree of variation present both between and within speakers regardless of geographical location. This variation applies to all of the pronominal categories that we examined.

With respect to the independent personal pronominal paradigm, we found a widespread trend towards paradigm levelling, with the traditional three-way nominative/accusative/dative distinction in the singular shifting to a two-way nominative/objective distinction, and the traditional two-way nominative/objective distinction in the 1pl and 2pl shifting to a single unchanging form. These changes appear to have been driven by the effects of substantial dialect mixing, with the historical Mideastern Yiddish pronominal paradigm exerting the greatest influence, both in terms of the structure of the paradigm and in terms of actual forms used (e.g. the 2pl form *enk*). The reflexive paradigm has also undergone a degree of levelling in comparison with the pre-War Mideastern variety of Yiddish. Our survey also allowed us to map a system of strong and weak personal pronouns, which are likely to have existed in some form or another in pre-War Yiddish varieties, especially the Mideastern ones, but, perhaps because they are an effect of colloquial speech, have not been clearly documented previously. It is noteworthy that 'vus' speakers appear to have a nominative/objective distinction in the weak 3pl, which does not to the best of our knowledge have historical precedent and stands in contrast to the general trend towards simplification in the personal pronoun paradigm.

The possessive pronouns have dependent and independent variants. The dependent variants exhibit one form (with a ∅-ending) when modifying a singu-

lar noun and another one (with an *-e* ending) when modifying a plural noun. This is in keeping with the pre-War model and goes against our prediction that the Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish dependent possessive pronouns would have undergone or be undergoing the same streamlining process as attributive adjectives, which we have elsewhere (Belk et al. 2020, In press) demonstrated to have lost their pre-War case and gender distinctions in favour of an invariant attributive marker *-e*. The independent variants are morphologically distinct from their dependent counterparts, but have lost all of the pre-War case and gender distinctions in favour of a more streamlined innovative model with two paradigms, *-s* and *-e*, which have the same function and can be used interchangeably even within the speech of a single participant.

The demonstrative pronouns likewise have dependent and independent variants. The proximal/distal distinction exhibited in both the dependent and independent variants differs from those of both English and Modern Hebrew, with the "distals" serving primarily to mark contrast. The stem used for the proximal demonstratives varies somewhat and thus seems to be in flux, though 'vos' speakers tend to use the traditional definite determiner forms (*der, di, dos*, and *dem*, though without the pre-War case and gender distinctions), while 'vus' speakers tend to use the novel stem *dey-*. The dependent variants behave morphologically like (Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish) definite determiners, i.e. they show no case or gender distinctions. However, the independent variants show a novel nominative/objective case distinction (in contrast to pre-War Yiddish, which exhibited the same case and gender morphology as the definite article and adjectives). This suggests that the demonstratives have been reanalyzed on analogy with the personal pronouns and follow the same pattern of a two-way nominal/objective distinction that the singular personal pronouns exhibit. As such, we posit that Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish has innovated a novel demonstrative pronoun.

These innovative features of the pronominal system support our claim that the Yiddish spoken in 21st-century Hasidic communities constitutes a distinct variety of the language, which, though descended from the pre-War Eastern European dialects, has evolved away from them to such an extent that it can no longer be analyzed within this older dialectal framework. While the pronominal system has not lost case and gender in the same way that the nominal system has, the pronominal innovations are of the same magnitude as those affecting the nominal case and gender system. Our analysis shows that Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish has not simply lost forms and functions in comparison with the pre-War varieties, but rather has innovated them. These innovative features are not determined directly by contact with the dominant co-territorial languages, but rather

are internal developments which bear witness to the linguistic vibrancy of Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish.

# **Abbreviations**

# **Acknowledgements**

We gratefully acknowledge Eli Benedict for his help in administering the questionnaire, as well as for his insightful discussions. We are also thankful for the contributions of Shifra Hiley, and for the cooperation of our participants. This research is generously funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

# **References**

# **Chapter 7**

# **Validity of crowd-sourced minority language data: Observing variation patterns in the Stimmen recordings**

# Nanna Hiltona

aUniversity of Groningen

Minority languages are underrepresented in linguistic research, and a possible reason for this is the lack of accessible speech recordings from lesser-used languages. This paper considers the usability of crowd sourced minority language data for research, focussing on the speech recordings and reported dialect knowledge collected with the smartphone application Stimmen, ('Voices' in Frisian). In this paper variation patterns in Frisian speech data from the Stimmen project (2017-2019) are compared with findings from previous sociolinguistic research in Fryslân. The comparison focusses on three phonological variables in Frisian speech: the coda cluster /sk/; the vowel in 'eye', and the realisation of post-vocalic coda /r/. The analysis conducted on the crowd sourced recordings show the same variation patterns as that of previous research, giving validity to the data for use in sociolinguistic studies of variation and change in minority language settings. This gives hope for future research that relies on the collection of speech samples in a remote capacity.

# **1 Background**

## **1.1 The European bias in (socio)linguistics**

The 'Stimmen fan Fryslân' project, Stimmen for short, is a citizen science project with the aim of collecting speech data from lesser used languages for research and technological development. While we estimate that there are 5,000-7,000 languages used across the globe, publications within the field of linguistics largely

represent (speakers of) large languages, and especially English. Nagy & Meyerhoff (2008) conclude, for example, that in 449 publications and presentations in four key outlets for research in (variationist) sociolinguistics 50-70% concerns the English language.

For a field such as sociolinguistics, that deals predominantly with diversity in language, how and why language changes, and what the linguistic and social consequences of such changes are (cf. Weinreich et al. 1968), it is clear that biases in the empirical foundations are problematic. This is a likely reason why in recent decades more studies have appeared that incorporate the social reality outside that of majority populations into sociolinguistic theory. Stanford & Preston (2009) and Stanford (2016) point out how minority language communities offer a welcome chance for variationist sociolinguistics to revisit principles of linguistic variation and change, most of which take a European, or Anglo-American, linguistic and societal constellations for granted. Nagy (2009: 400) notes in her study of Faetar that minority languages without a codified and accepted standard give sociolinguists an opportunity to do research without influence from a standard language ideology. Studies outside the Anglo-American sphere also reconsider the arrangements of the traditional social variables class, gender and age: Noglo (2009), for example, shows how factors such as monetary income, property ownership and fortune are not part of what constitutes social class in many societies, providing a case study where ethnicity and community membership is used to define layers of social hierarchies. Brunelle (2009), similarly, argues how the Labovian principles of gender and language cannot be assumed before carefully considering the type of access to political and financial privilege and prestige that women have in specific communities outside the US and UK. O'Shannessy (2009) indicates in her study of language change in northern Australian indigenous languages that the variationist sociolinguistic principles of age and apparent time cannot be assumed in communities where contact with a majority language is widespread and the younger generations have a higher degree of bilingualism.

Perhaps more than for other linguistic disciplines the study of social variation in language is reliant on previous descriptive work having been done for the language in question. A researcher wanting to enter a community to understand the social role of language is reliant on already being a speaker of the language, or on available teaching material for acquiring the language. Arguably, linguistic documentation is also key for a number of applications of our linguistic research: the development of language technology, monitoring of learning abilities, and forensic analyzes concerning language, cannot exist without proper documentation. It is problematic then, that the majority of the world's languages are still

under-documented (Hammarström and Nordhoff, 2011). More than a thousand varieties are only described with a wordlist, a text collection, or not at all. One of the challenges the linguistic community is faced with as of now is that available data, and particularly speech data, from lesser used languages is hard to come by. While collections of speech can often be found on the internet, it may not be in a format that lends itself well for research, without annotation and translations, for example, or of poor quality due to recordings made in noisy environments.

### **1.2 Citizen science and crowd sourcing language data**

A way to increase representation of under-resourced language communities in science is to engage in "citizen science": the participation of the general public alongside scientific researchers, in some or all steps of the research project (cf. Bonney et al. 2016). While the label "citizen science" is relatively recent, the practice itself is not. In linguistics, the contribution of the general public as providers of empirical data has a history that goes back centuries. Early descriptive linguistic work, such as dialectological studies where speakers of localised varieties provided data for the analysis of regional variation in language (e.g. Wenker 1881), can be seen as examples of "citizen science". However, recent technological developments have made public involvement in linguistic research substantially easier to facilitate, see, for instance, examples of dialectological surveys being conducted using the internet such as Vaux (2004) and Möller & Elspaß (2015). Smartphones offer further functionalities that can be employed to collect, store, share and analyze large amounts of language. Applications for iOS or Android have been used to, e.g. collect speech for development of language technology (De Vries et al. 2014), to make high-quality recordings for acoustic phonetic research (De Decker & Nycz 2011), or to collect reported language use for the creation of new dialect maps (Kolly & Leemann 2015). Yet, an issue with remote crowd sourcing of speech data remains its anonymous nature and the lack of control on the side of the researcher.

### **1.3 What constitutes "good" crowd sourced minority language data?**

A commonly held conception about crowd sourced data is that it is problematic for research purposes due to the lack of control that the researcher can execute over the data collection process and context. Researchers could receive contributions that are done merely in jest, there could be participants who contribute several times, there could be contributors who have not read instructions, or contributions that do not meet the expectations of the researcher in another way.

#### Nanna Hilton

Studies of the validity and reliability of crowd sourced data indicate that these worries are not entirely justified. Lind et al. (2017) find in their study of "crowdcoding" (coding of content analysis of news articles in German) that paid volunteers (through the platform Mturk) performed comparably to five research assistants, but that there was variability across different types of tasks, and within the group of coders. Horn (2019) concludes in a study of whether non-expert coders can perform quite complex content analysis of political messages, and conclude that crowd sourced coding is equally reliable to that of experts. However, there seems to be a limit to task complexity before the validity and reliability suffers: Shing et al. (2018) compare experts' and crowds' (CrowdFlower) annotations of online postings for authors' suicide risk, and find, unsurprisingly, that the experts outperform the crowd, even when the crowd has been given detailed task instructions. One previous study has considered the validity of crowd sourced linguistic judgements for the purpose of studying language variation and change. Leemann et al. (2016) find that the dialect judgements crowd sourced with the smartphone based Dialekt Äpp correlate to a high degree with speech samples collected with traditional dialectological methods.

The findings in Leemann et al. (2016) bode well for a study of the validity of crowd sourced speech data using smartphones. However, a number of validityrelated concerns exist specifically for the crowd sourcing of minority language data. Shameem (1998) points out, for example, that self-reported minority language proficiencies do not always compare to actual test results. In her study of Indo-Fijans living in New Zealand she finds some over-reporting of oral minority language proficiency. Contrarily, Nicholas (1988) finds that minority children typically under-report their knowledge of the heritage language in surveys of British language diversity. There is also reason to question whether surveys designed for the whole of a minority speech community does in fact reach all those that could interest the researcher. "New speakers", for instance, could experience a lack of ownership and legitimacy in the use of the minority language (cf. O'Rourke & Ramallo 2013) and not see themselves as "real" minority language speakers.

Minority language communities cannot be approached with the traditional dialectological methods employed for instance in Leemann et al. (2016) either. While many minority languages may have a written standard, the acceptance levels of the standard language can be highly variable within the communities. Dorian (1978: 592) concludes that a majority language, in her case English, can act as the formal register in bilingual speakers who are less proficient in a minority variety, Gaelic in the case at hand. In communities where the minority language is not used throughout the educational system the majority language

generally enjoys higher instrumental value. This means that the reliance of written language in crowd sourcing of minority language can be problematic, with respondents wanting to perform well and give the most correct form as a response. This could lead to questionable outcomes, complicating the design of the study.

This study is the first to consider the validity of crowd-sourced speech data from a minority language. It does so by comparing the speech that users have themselves, as the citizen scientists, categorised as "Frisian", collected in a picture naming task in the Stimmen application, with previous data collected in Fryslân to investigate language variation and change. Additionally, data from a gamified dialect task for Frisian is used for the comparison. Before moving on to the analysis of the speech data the design and the context of the study is laid out below.

# **2 The current study**

#### **2.1 Frisian and the basis for data comparison**

Fryslân is the only officially multilingual province in the Netherlands, and is a region in which several (regional and migrant) minority languages are used. Frisian-Dutch bilingualism is widespread in the province: 75% of the 9915 inhabitants that the Province of Fryslân surveyed in 2015 report being able to speak Frisian (TaalAtlas 2015: 3). Three quarters of the population would correspond to some 485,000 speakers of Frisian in Fryslân (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek 2018). These speakers are all presumed bilingual as secondary schooling is taught partially, or only, in Dutch. The province Fryslân is also home to mixed languages (results of long-term contact between Dutch and Frisian) 'Bildts' and 'Town Frisian' (van Bree 1994, Hoekstra & van Koppen 2000), as well as to varieties of another West-Germanic language family: Low Saxon, spoken along the southern border of the province of Fryslân.

An assumption for sociolinguistic work on Frisian is that the language is converging towards Dutch on all linguistic levels, cf. Breuker (1992) and De Haan (1997). The study of contact phenomena between Frisian and Dutch has been given considerable attention in Frisian linguistics, e.g. Sjölin (1976), yet generally in an introspective manner, or with anecdotal evidence. Very few empirical studies of speech variation in Frisian exist, and those that have been conducted have all been studies of phonetics and phonology. They indicate no evidence of convergence between Frisian and Dutch: Feitsma et al. (1987, data collected

#### Nanna Hilton

1982–1984) is the oldest study available, looking at sandhi phenomena in an apparent time study. The study finds no signs of convergence between Frisian and Dutch, but rather indications of divergence for some phonetic variables. Van Bezooijen (2009) investigates the variation and change in pronunciation of /r/ in Frisian, which traditionally has the alveolar trill, and concludes that the approximant variant of /r/ that is gaining ground in the Dutch speech community does not occur at all in the Frisian data (Van Bezooijen 2009: 312). Finally, Nota et al. (2016) find gender and age differences in the realisation of intonation contours in 40 bilingual Frisian-Dutch speakers, but no direct indications that Dutch and Frisian intonation contours are converging.

In this paper, the research question does not directly concern the convergence between Frisian and Dutch, but rather asks what the usability, that is, the validity, of Frisian data collected by crowd sourcing is for conducting sociolinguistic analyzes. However, the data will be compared to other work concerned with the question of whether Frisian is changing towards Dutch and can in that sense possibly corroborate some previous findings. One of the data sets used for comparison is that of Van Bezooijen (2009), used to compare variation patterns in the pronunciation of (r). Furthermore, variation in the consonant coda cluster (sk) is looked at alongside data from Hilton & Weening (2014). Variation in the vowel in the word *each* "eye" is also considered, by comparing crowd-sourced data to that from an ongoing study by Stefan, Klinkenberg & Versloot (cf. Stefan et al. 2014).

### **2.2 The citizen science project "Stimmen"**

The crowd sourced data discussed in this paper was collected with the smartphone application Stimmen. The app was part of the larger "Stimmen fan Fryslân" project funded by the program "Lân fan taal" in the European Capital of Culture project for Leeuwarden 2018. The citizen science components of the Stimmen project consisted of collaboration with twelve secondary schools in Fryslân as well as numerous online and offline activities held throughout the year of 2018. An estimated 2,000 respondents were reached through the offline activities, that gave the researchers an opportunity to share findings with the general public, and, crucially, for the public to approach the researchers to post questions about language. Since the start of the project the smartphone application has been downloaded 6,039 times (iOS: 2,989; Android: 3,050. In 2017, 28% of smartphones in the Netherlands was an iPhone (Steemers et al. 2017), but the application could also be downloaded on an iPad which may eschew the iOS user numbers), yet this is not equivalent to the amount of people who have submitted data through

the application. The dialect quiz has been used a total of 15,131 times. The discrepancy between the two figures can be explained by the fact that the dialect quiz, see details below, is also available as an easily shared web application on stimmen.nl.

# **3 The Stimmen smartphone application**

The Stimmen application is available for Android or iOS and consists of the following components: a start screen with choice of interface language (English, Dutch, or Frisian), a tutorial, and a root menu with choices of four options: a picture naming task, a dialect quiz, a speech map in which free speech can be recorded, and an "about" section. In this paper, the data collected with the picture naming task and the dialect quiz are considered only. For an overview of all the functionalities of the application, the researchers' ethical considerations, and the collection of other speech and language attitude data, see Hilton (2021).

### **3.1 The Stimmen picture naming task**

In the Stimmen application, a picture naming task can be found with 87 handdrawn images of everyday objects in the Netherlands. The scientific purpose of this module is to collect data that can be used to document phonological and phonetic patterns for any language recorded, but the nameability and selection with regards to avoiding heteronyms was done on the basis of the varieties spoken in Fryslân, only. The 87 constructs represent all the phonemes and their allophonic realisations in the most spoken varieties found in the region were the activities surrounding Stimmen were primarily conducted: in the north of the Netherlands. The current list of languages in which one can record includes 38 different languages, but more can be added by contacting the Stimmen team, or the author of this paper.

When opening the picture task from the root menu a prompt informs the participants that the aim of the task is to name as many pictures as possible, and in as many languages as they can. Next, participants are asked to fill in a short questionnaire about where they are from (to indicate this on a map), their gender, their age bracket, which languages they are most fluent in, which languages they actively use in their life, and to answer the open question whether there is anything they would like to share with the researchers about their own variety. Upon considerations with the ethics committee and legal experts associated

#### Nanna Hilton

with the project it was decided that further biographical data could not be collected due to privacy concerns, as the speech recordings are publicly available alongside the social information collected.

Figure 1: The meta-data questionnaire used for all tasks in 'Stimmen'.

Participants are then asked which language they would like to record in. After choosing a language, a randomised selection of a picture is made and shown to the user. They can then press the screen to record, and thereafter send the recording to the researchers. A prompt asks whether the user is sure they want to share the recording publicly. After naming 10 pictures the user can choose to go on or go to the gallery of named pictures to check their progress.

### **3.1.1 The recordings made in the picture naming task**

Some 2,000 distinct individuals have used the picture naming task up until 2020, creating 41,553 individual recordings of words. 24,214 of these were created by female speakers, 17,028 by male speakers and 311 by speakers identifying as 'other'. The age distribution of the recordings is found in Figure 5. Almost half of the recordings are made by respondents younger than 30 years, which means that the recordings in Stimmen represent younger language. For the sake of investigating language change in progress this may not be a disadvantage, but for any

7 Validity of crowd-sourced minority language data

Figure 2: Some of the possible recording languages in 'Stimmen'.

Figure 3: Word gallery after naming four pictures in 'Stimmen'.

#### Nanna Hilton

Figure 4: Screenshot of the picture task in 'Stimmen', showing the picture 'mouth'.

study reliant on balanced age data, one would need to take this imbalance into account in the analysis.

Figure 5: Distribution of recordings from the picture task in 'Stimmen' across age groups.

The top eight languages recorded in the picture naming task are shown in Table 1. Nearly three quarters of the recordings are made in Frisian, or varieties spoken within Fryslân.

Table 1: Number of Recordings Made by Languages in Stimmen Picture Task

#### **3.2 The Stimmen dialect quiz**

A second component of the Stimmen application is a gamified task that guesses where people hail from within the Province of Fryslân. This task, "dialect quiz", was based on Leemann & Kolly (2013) and their subsequent applications. Data gathered with this module provides researchers with the public's knowledge of traditional linguistic variants, and regional and social (age, gender) variation in reported dialect use can be analyzed. A straight-forward way to develop a dialect quiz is to use an existing corpus of speech samples and create a set of questions that will result in a unique combination of answers for each of the locations represented in the corpus. Naturally, this is not easily done for minority languages. However, for the case of Frisian, mixed languages and Low Saxon as spoken in Fryslân previous dialectological work facilitated this. The prediction in Stimmen was created based on the GTRP database (2017) with data from 58 informants from the 1980s in Fryslân. The GTRP allowed for creation of a multilingual prediction for 58 different locations in Fryslân in which varieties of Frisian, Low Saxon and mixed languages are spoken.

While the picture naming task described in 3.1 was developed for use in *any* language, this part of the application was directed only at inhabitants of Fryslân. The quiz game asked users to provide their local variant for 19 Standard Dutch words (see Table 1), as all inhabitants of Fryslân are believed to be fluent in Dutch. 2-10 possible variants were available to the user to listen to and to choose between. After giving their personal variant to all 19 words the app makes three guesses of where a user could be from. The user can then indicate whether this prediction is correct or not and fill in the same meta-data questionnaire as used for the picture naming task (see Figure 1).

Table 2: Words in Stimmen's Dialect Quiz

#### **3.2.1 The data collected in the dialect quiz component**

Of the 15,131 times the dialect quiz has been used, the survey has been filled in 3,340 times: 1,688 times by a female user; 1,633 by a male user and 19 times by a user identifying as 'other'. This rather low proportion (some 22%) of respondents filling in meta data could have to do with the fact that the survey was easily skipped in the popular web version of the Quiz (it was the very last component and the respondents had already received their guessed location). The age distribution of those using the Dialect Quiz and filling in the survey is given in Figure 6. Note that, as was the case in the picture task recordings, the youngest generations are over-represented in the collected data.

The project website houses interactive maps of the distributions of the answers for all variables and all variants, on http://stimmen.nl/uitspraakkaarten/.

Figure 6: Distribution of survey responses in the Dialect Quiz in Stimmen across ages.

# **4 Analysis of variation in the Stimmen corpus**

The manner chosen to validate the data collected with the picture naming task and the dialect quiz in the Stimmen project is to compare patterns of variation in the data with that found in studies collected with different methodologies, in approximately the same time period, in the Province of Fryslân. There are three comparisons that can be made with data in the Stimmen corpus: i) a comparison between the variation patterns in production of the coda cluster (sk) in the picture naming task, alongside reported usage of the variants from the dialect quiz data, with usage patterns found by Hilton & Weening (2014), ii) a comparison between the reported usage of the pronunciation variants for the Frisian word for 'eye' *each* in Stimmen with reported usage of the variants in Stefan, Klinkenberg & Versloot (2014), and iii) a comparison between the variation patterns in (r) in the data from the picture naming task with that in Van Bezooijen (2009).

## **4.1 Variation in (sk)**

The coda cluster (sk) in Frisian has two variants: [sk] is the canonical Frisian variant but variant [s] is also commonplace. [s] is the variant used in equivalent cognates in the majority language Dutch. The variable occurs in two morphological contexts: (1) as the coda to a number of nouns and verbs that had <sk> as (part of the) coda in Old Frisian and other older Germanic varieties (OED Online, 2015); i.e., *fisk* 'fish'; *wask* 'wash'; *bosk* 'forest' or, more frequently throughout the lexicon, as (2) the coda in the adjectival or adverbial suffix equivalent to English 'ic': a) *histoarysk* 'historic' *fantastysk* 'fantastic', in which it occurs in the loan-morpheme –ysk from High German and Dutch. The Dutch equivalent phoneme in cognate words in both (1) and (2) above is /s/ cf. Dutch *vis*; *was*; *bos; historisch*; *fantastisch*. Hilton & Weening (2014) find lexical constraints exist on

#### Nanna Hilton

the variation with certain adjectives and nouns less likely pronounced with the full cluster, and some words, such as *gânsk* 'whole' never undergoing variation. Furthermore, a higher writing proficiency in the minority language correlates with a higher proportion of the minority variant [sk] in speech. Hilton & Weening (2014) further argue that the variant [sk] is associated with being authentically Frisian. The data from Hilton & Weening (2014) has been made available for comparison with the data collected in the Stimmen app. That data was collected using a translation task and a 'map task' (where two participants must lead each other through incongruent maps) with 31 participants aged 15-62 (M=39.9, SD=14.2); where 15 participants were male, 16 female.

In the Stimmen application, the lexical item 'fisk' exists both in the dialect quiz, where 3144 of the informants who filled in questionnaires reported their variant usage, as well as in the picture naming task, where 419 recordings were made. 14 recordings were discarded from the corpus, due to the recording being inaudible, or the naming of the picture as a particular breed of fish (most often *bears* 'perch'). In the data from Hilton & Weening (2014), 76 tokens of 'fish' exist. The distribution of the pronunciation variants of 'fish' in the three different data sets are rendered in Table 3–5. The Dialect Quiz and Picture Task data render the same distributions as the data collected by Hilton & Weening (2014). It is also clear that female speakers use a higher proportion of [s] than males in all three data sets.

Table 3: The distribution of variants [s] and [sk] in the three data sets compared

### **4.2 Variation in (each) - 'eye'**

A second linguistic variable in the crowd sourced Stimmen data that can be compared to other research is the reported pronunciation of 'eye' *each*. This linguistic variable has a standardised variant in written Frisian, which is representative

Table 4: The distribution of variants [s] and [sk] in the three data sets compared

Table 5: The distribution of variants [s] and [sk] in the three data sets compared

of one of three main variants that exist in spoken language [ɪ.əx], while variants [e:x] and [ɛ:x] are associated with particular regional varieties of Frisian (cf. Breuker 1992: 19), making the variable particularly suitable to consider when assessing whether regional dialect levelling, or convergence, is ongoing in the Frisian speech community.

No published studies of this variable exist, but the authors of an on-going linguistic survey project (Stefan, Klinkenberg & Versloot p.c.) in Fryslân have kindly provided a map with distributions of the three Frisian variants for *eye* in 250 survey responses. The study uses a traditional dialectological methodology with a survey including direct questions about language use and attitudes (see Stefan et al., 2014 for more details of the methodology). The resulting dialectological map, shown in Figure 7, can be compared to the dialect maps made with the answers from the dialect quiz in the Stimmen project.

In figure 7, the regional distributions of the variants for eye in the comparison dataset is shown. The variant is indicated by the colour of the municipality as well as in the pie charts. The western and southern municipalities as shown in Figure 8 have a majority of *eech* [e:x], while the central north and north-west has

Figure 7: Distribution of the variants for 'eye' in an ongoing study by Stefan, Klinkenberg & Versloot (p.c.).

a majority of standard variant *each* [ɪ.əx]. The final variant êch [ɛ:x], indicated with green colour, is particularly frequent in the north-eastern municipality. If looking at distribution maps1 for variant usage in the Stimmen corpus in Figures 8–10, we see a very comparable picture in the distribution of the variants (despite using lower level neighbourhood borders, as opposed to municipal borders). Each map contains the number of realisations of the different variants in the top right corner. Each realisation is a unique user. The brown variant in Figure 7, is *eech* [e:x] in Figure 8 and shows dark red colours throughout the southern areas and up alongside the western border of Fryslân. Variant *each* [ɪ.əx] (blue in Figure 7) variant has the highest proportion in the central and western part of the north of Fryslân also in Figure 9. Finally, the êch [ɛ:x] variant (green in Figure 7) shows the highest proportion in the north-eastern area in Figure 10. The dialect quiz data, then, shows a regional distribution of variants that follow the same pattern as that in findings of investigation using more traditional dialectological methodologies.

1 I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to Herbert Kruitbosch for creating the interactive maps of the responses in the dialect quiz. They can be found on stimmen.nl/uitspraakkaarten

Figure 8: The regional distribution of the eech [e:x] response in the Stimmen Dialect Quiz, corresponding to the brown variant in Figure 7. Darker colours indicate higher reported usage frequency, grey areas indicate no reported usage.

## **4.3 Variation in (r)**

The last sociolinguistic variable for which we can compare previous data with that from the Stimmen project is (r). A highly noticeable sound change that has taken place in Dutch in recent decades has been the innovation and spread of variant [ɻ], the approximant bunched realisation of post-vocalic coda /r/. This is a feature popularly referred to as a 'Gooise r'. In a large-scale study Sebregts (2015) concludes that age, region as well as gender predict the use of the approximant variant in Dutch, with female speakers using the highest proportion of the [ɻ], a finding supported by evidence in Van Bezooijen (2005). One interesting research question is whether, in highly bilingual populations, sociolinguistic variants are taken on also in a second, closely related language. This is what Van Bezooijen (2009) considers, studying pronunciation in a picture naming task eliciting coda /r/. In the data collected from 26 Frisian-speaking and 30 Town-Frisian subjects, there is no sign of convergence towards variation patterns found in Dutch. No approximant codas are found at all in her analysis of the realisations of 'boer' *farmer* and 'gieter' *water can*. The main variant of /r/ used in Fryslân is alveolar, with uvular variants present in respondents who speak Town Frisian.

Figure 9: The regional distribution of the each [ɪ.əx] response in the Stimmen Dialect Quiz, corresponding to the blue variant in Figure 7. Darker colours indicate higher reported usage frequency, grey areas indicate no reported usage.

Bakker (2018) uses the spoken data collected in the Stimmen project labelled 'Frisian' to consider whether [ɻ] has gained ground in Fryslân a decade after Van Bezooijen (2009). Using auditory analysis and an additional coder he considers variation in the recordings of 'ear' *ear* from the Stimmen picture task and concludes that the usage of the approximant variant is very rare (1.6% of the cases), as can be seen in Table 3–3. He calls for more research, as he finds that the approximant variants are produced by young female speakers and discusses whether the Stimmen data could show the first stage of introduction of the variant to Frisian. For the purpose of the aim of the current paper, however, it is fair to conclude that a percentage of 1.6% is comparable to the finding that Van Bezooijen made, of negligible usage of the approximant variant in coda position in Frisian speech.

Note that Bakker (2018) attests a larger proportion of uvular variants (7.3%) in the Frisian Stimmen data than that attested in Van Bezooijen (2009; 0%). The difference between the two findings might be explained by the fact that the Stimmen data includes recordings from a much larger regional area than that included by Van Bezooijen (2009). In the Stimmen data, respondents living in areas in which

Figure 10: The regional distribution of the êch [ɛ:x] response in the Stimmen Dialect Quiz, corresponding to the green variant in Figure 7. Darker colours indicate higher reported usage frequency, grey areas indicate no reported usage.

Table 6: Variants of /r/ produced (as coded by Bakker 2018) in the Stimmen picture naming task ('ear'), and in the data reported by Van Bezooijen (2009).

#### Nanna Hilton

Town Frisian and Bildts are spoken (and where the uvular variant is widespread) feature in the data set. This could possibly have resulted in a higher proportion of uvular /r/ recordings, not only for the data labelled as "Town Frisian", but also for the data labelled as "Frisian". Bakker (2018) concludes that the most uvular variants in the Stimmen data are produced by subjects who state they come from Leeuwarden, the Sneek, or Franeker areas, which are all areas in which Town Frisian is spoken alongside Frisian and Dutch. The development of Town Frisian and its relationship to Frisian on a phonological level is a topic worthy of further research, on the basis of the findings in Bakker (2018).

# **5 Discussion and conclusion**

The aim of this paper has been to validate the use of crowd sourced language data from minority languages for linguistic research. Crowd sourcing is a possible means to increase available research data from such languages. Currently the amount of available data for research from such languages is minimal, something that was also true for the minoritised varieties in the north of the Netherlands before the initiation of the Stimmen project. Overall, Stimmen has been a successful attempt in gathering large amounts of speech data from minority language users, but primarily those in the Netherlands. The data collected in the project is predominantly from younger users but is well-balanced in terms of gender representation.

Previous considerations of validity of crowd sourced data indicates that quality can be comparable to that collected with traditional methods, as long as the task for the user is not too complex. In the Stimmen application, users were asked to record their own words for pictures in the Picture Naming Task, or to indicate which variant they use in a Dialect Quiz, made especially for inhabitants of Fryslân. When considering validity of a method one should ideally test the outcomes from the methodology against a larger test battery. However, the amount of research data available from minority communities, including the community in question in this paper, Frisian, gives a rather small basis of comparison. Yet, the relatively recent sociolinguistic work that is available for comparison, Hilton & Weening (2014), Stefan, Klinkenberg, and Versloot (fc.) and Van Bezooijen (2009) all display very similar results to those found in analyzes of the data from Stimmen. This indicates that the data collected through the Stimmen application is valuable resource for investigating linguistic variation.

The finding that crowd sourced data from minority languages can be used for research of variation in speech is welcome. In a world in which travel, and

contact, restrictions have become more common-place the opportunity to collect data remotely is a game changer. Mobile phones and other portable technology that allows contact with a speech community within a simple click should be taken into use as much as possible. The inclusion of data collected using smartphones and virtual games can lead to much wider representation, not only of different linguistic varieties, but also of more participants, in research. Future work in this field should focus on whether remote efforts also increases the participation of contested language users, such as new speakers, and how one can ensure that a representative sample of all age groups is included in remote studies.

# **References**

Möller, Robert & Stephan Elspaß. 2015. *21. atlas zur deutschen alltagssprache (ada)*.

#### Nanna Hilton

Wenker, Georg. 1881. *Sprach-Atlas von Nord-und Mitteldeutschland: Text und Einleitung: Auf Grund von systematisch mit Hülfe der Volksschullehrer gesammeltem Material aus circa 30000 Orten*. Strassburg: Trübner.

# **Chapter 8**

# **Complexity of endangered minority languages: The sound system of Wymysiöeryś**

Alexander Andrasona

a Stellenbosch University

> This paper demonstrates that Wymysiöeryś – a severely endangered Germanic minority language – exhibits remarkable complexity despite its moribund status. By analyzing twelve phonetic/phonological properties, the author concludes that the complexity of Wymysiöeryś is greater, both locally and globally, than that of two control languages: Middle High German and Modern Standard German. In most cases, the surplus of complexity attested is attributed to contact with the dominant language, Polish.

# **1 Introduction**

Language endangerment, language shift, language obsolescence, and language death all have "considerable impact" on the *structure* of the languages affected (Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 110).1 The most pervasive form of impact is the apparent simplification and impoverishment of the *grammar* of endangered and moribund languages (see Dorian 1973: 590–591, 1980: 85, Silva-Corvalán 1995: 9, Mesthrie et al. 2009: 256, Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 110–117, Sallabank 2012: 101, 111, 118, 2013: 126, Filipović & Pütz 2016: 2, Aikhenvald 2007: 43, Meakins et al. 2019: 294, 297) – whether it is phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax,

1The present article emerged as a result of my PhD dissertation, *Polish borrowings in Wymysiöeryś: A formal linguistic analysis of Germano-Slavonic language contact in Wilamowice* (Andrason 2021).

Alexander Andrason. 2022. Complexity of endangered minority languages: The sound system of Wymysiöeryś. In Matt Coler & Andrew Nevins (eds.), *Contemporary research in minoritized and diaspora languages of Europe*, 213–260. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7446969

or vocabulary (Dorian 1978: 591, 1980: 85, Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 110, 113– 115).2 Even though these reductive processes are especially patent and the most rampant in the varieties used by semi-speakers or rusty speakers, who do not learn the language fully in an intergenerational transmission and/or do not use it for the greater parts of their lives (see Palosaari & Campbell 2011, Grinevald & Bert 2011), simplification and impoverishment also seem to affect speakers whose language acquisition was uninterrupted and/or who have spoken the language relatively continuously. Overall, an endangered or dying language viewed as *a holistic* (though not uniform) *linguistic phenomenon* apparently reduces its complexity generation after generation (Austin 1986: 203; see also Dorian 1978, 1980, Swiggers 2007, Sallabank 2012, 2013, Palosaari & Campbell 2011, Filipović & Pütz 2016).3 This especially occurs in destabilized or unbalanced types of language contact in which the endangered language is gradually displaced by the dominant code (Aikhenvald 2007: 47, Meakins et al. 2019).4

Simplification is a common phenomenon in language contact (McWhorter 1998, 2001, Matras & Sakel 2007). It is typical of pidgins (Mühlhäusler 1977, 1986, Trudgill 1986, 1996, 2010: 306–308, Kusters 2003, Siegel 2008: 190, Juvonen 2008: 321–322) and, albeit to a lesser extent and not without contest (DeGraff 2003, 2005, Ansaldo & Matthews 2007: 12–14, Hammarström 2008: 300, Bakker et al. 2011) of creoles (McWhorter 1998, 2001, 2005, Seuren & Wekker 2001, Parkvall 2008). The noticeable exceptions are mixed languages, which may maintain or even increase complexity (Matras 2009: 288, 305, Meakins et al. 2013, Velupillai

2 Simplification typically implies reduction or loss of marked features (Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 113, Sallabank 2013: 126) due to regularization and overgeneralization (Silva-Corvalán 1995: 9–10, Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 113, Sallabank 2013: 126, Filipović & Pütz 2016: 2). The features that tend to be reduced or lost involve: phonological contrasts (Dorian 1980: 85, Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 113), morphological marking and distinctions (Dorian 1980: 85, Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 115, Meakins et al. 2019: 297), synthetic structures (which are replaced by analytic constructions) (Silva-Corvalán 1995: 10, Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 115, Meakins et al. 2019: 297), syntactic (Dorian 1980: 85, Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 115) and stylistic patterns (Dorian 1980: 85, Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 115), as well as vocabulary (Sallabank 2012: 118).

3 It should be noted that many scholars speak about the simplification of endangered and dying languages *in general* (Dorian 1980: 85, Austin 1986: 203, Swiggers 2007: 24, Mesthrie et al. 2009: 256, Palosaari & Campbell 2011: 110, 112, Sallabank 2013: 118) rather than referring to the variety that is *only* used by semi-speakers. After all, it would not be surprising that, similar to imperfect L2 speakers, semi-speakers would not make use of the entire linguistic repertoire available in the language.

4Certainly, language endangerment and language contact are not the same phenomenon. However, although a language may die "without language shift" (Austin 1986: 201), most cases of language endangerment and language death "involve language *replacement* or shift" (Austin 1986: 201). This presupposes contact between the languages involved and bilingualism of endangered language speakers, at least at the population level.

2015: 301–307, 329–330, 402, Meakins et al. 2019: 296–297, 326–327) and layered languages, which may exhibit traces of both simplification and complexification (Aikhenvald 2007: 42–43).5

The present paper examines whether the severe endangerment of a language – specifically, a minority language that has nearly been replaced by another code and drifts towards a seemingly imminent death – is correlated with structural simplicity; or, inversely, whether severely endangered languages may exhibit remarkable complexity due to the transfer of elements from the dominant code. The language system under analysis is Wymysiöeryś – a colonial East Central German variety that has interacted with the dominant Polish language for more than seven centuries (Putschke 1980: 498, Wiesinger 1980: 497–498, Wicherkiewicz 2003) and that, due to increasingly aggressive Polonization, has been, more or less, endangered since the end of World War I in 1918 (Neels 2016), currently finding itself on the verge of total extinction (Andrason & Król 2016).6 I will study the linguistic repertoires of fluent speakers – the remaining 65 native Wymysiöeryś speakers born between 1913 and 1993 who have acquired the language in uninterrupted intergenerational transmission and have spoken it relatively continuously.7 Inversely, the idiolects of semi-speakers – who do exhibit radical simplification and impoverishment processes but have no bearing on the transmission of Wymysiöeryś to the younger generations and thus the structure of the language as such – are not taken into consideration.

This study centers on the idea of absolute complexity (Kusters 2008, Dahl 2004, 2009, Miestamo 2008, 2009). To calculate absolute complexity, I deploy the concept of effective complexity (Gell-Mann 1995, Gell-Mann & Lloyd 2004) and take into account two main criteria: distinctiveness and economy (Miestamo 2006a, 2008, Sinnemäki 2008, 2009, 2011, Parkvall 2008). I focus on local complexities

5Although pre-pidgins, stabilized pidgins, expanded pidgins, creoles, and post-creole varieties are often simpler than the feeding languages (Velupillai 2015), they tend to – in the above order – gradually increase their complexity (Mühlhäusler 1986: 5–11, Parkvall 2008: 281, Trudgill 2010: 306, Velupillai 2015). Thus, both simplification and complexification are important factors in the development of pidgins and creoles (Heine & Kuteva 2005: 258, Trudgill 2010: 309), operating with distinct intensity at different stages of the pidgin-creole life cycle.

6Wymysiöeryś is classified as "nearly extinct", in the Extended Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale and "moribund" or "severely endangered" by Moseley & Nicholas (2010). The language is currently used by less than fifty elderly native speakers (Ritchie 2016: 73, Chromik 2016: 91) whose number rapidly decreases every year (Andrason & Król 2016, Andrason 2021).

7The number of these speakers was 65 at the beginning of the 21st century, when I started my research on Wymysiöeryś. Unfortunately, many of them have passed away in the interim (cf. footnote 6 above). For the list of these speakers, their names, and dates of birth see Andrason (2021).

pertaining to twelve distinct phonetic/phonological features, subsequently combining them into a global value representing the complexity of the entire soundsystem module (Miestamo 2006a,b, 2009, Deutscher 2009, Sinnemäki 2014). The complexity of Wymysiöeryś, both feature-locally and module-globally, will not be quantified autonomously, but will rather be narratively estimated in relation to two control systems: (a mother-system) Middle High German and (a sistersystem) Modern Standard German (cf. Deutscher 2009 and Dahl 2009). In instances where Wymysiöeryś exhibits a surplus of information – i.e. a positive difference in complexity when compared to the control languages – I will examine whether this surplus can be attributed to Polish influence, either in whole or in part.

The article will be organized as follows: in Section 2, I will explain the theoretical framework underlying my study or the manner of complexity measurement adopted. In Section 3, I will compare the complexities of Wymysiöeryś with those of Middle High German and Modern Standard German – first locally and next globally. In Section 4, I will verify whether, and how intensively, the surplus of information attested in Wymysiöeryś draws on Polish – again, first locally and next globally. In Section 5, I will draw conclusions and propose lines of future research.

# **2 Framework – measuring language complexity**

The approach adopted in this paper is one of the most common and theoretically least problematic manners of analyzing the complexity of natural languages. It draws on the idea of complexity that is: (a) epistemologically absolute, (b) computationally effective, (c) built around the criteria of distinctiveness and economy, (d) relational, and (e) primarily local. Below, I explain these five ideas in detail.

1. From an epistemological perspective, the type of complexity analyzed in this research is absolute. This complexity type pertains to the system viewed as "an autonomous entity" in disconnection from the observer (Kusters 2008: 4). Absolute complexity is therefore the "objective property of the [language] system" (Miestamo 2008: 23, Dahl 2004), regardless of the characteristics of its users, whether speakers, hearers, first-language or secondlanguage learners.8

8 Inversely, I am not concerned with relative complexity or complexity experienced by users of a given language (see Kusters 2003, Miestamo 2008: 23, 2009: 81–82). Some scholars do not regard relative complexity as complexity *sensu stricto* (Dahl 2004: 39–40) instead preferring the terms "difficulty" and "cost" (Miestamo 2008: 27, Lindström 2008).

9The other common manner of quantifying complexity is algorithmic complexity, also referred to as Kolmogorov complexity. This manner of quantification calculates disorder or randomness, e.g. the "amount of surprise" contained in a message (Mitchell 2009: 97–98) or the "difficulty of description" (Shalizi 2006: 52).

10Thus, synonymy, redundancy, allomorphy, and free variations increase complexity (McWhorter 2007, 2008). Similarly, exceptions contribute to the increase in complexity as they constitute additional rules (cf. Hammarström 2008: 29; see also McWhorter 2007, 2008).

11The selection of Middle High German and Modern Standard German as pre-contact and noncontact "control" languages, also stems from the availability of extensive and detailed grammatical studies dedicated to these languages, which render the comparison fully operational.

5. The estimation of effective complexity will mainly be conducted at a local level. I will determine how many of the selected phonetic/phonological features (categories) are instantiated in the tested languages (distinctiveness) and how many expression manners of each feature there are (economy).12 With regard to each feature, the analysis will be captured in a narrative form "drawing on the concepts of (approximate) equality ≈ (*x* ≈ *y* means that *x* is approximately equal to *y*), inequality ≤ (*x* ≤ *y* means that *x* is less than or equal to *y*), [and] strict inequality < (*x* < *y* means that *x* is less than *y*)" (Andrason et al. forthcoming).13 However, the analysis of complexity will not be limited to separated local domains. On the contrary, I will combine the local complexities into a global value that indicates the complexity of the entire sound-system module of each of the three languages.

The approach used in this paper has its limitations, which are inherent to and unavoidable in complexity studies. To begin, contemporary science lacks a single, comprehensive, all-purpose complexity measure. Instead, a variety of measurement methods – at least 48 as observed by Edmonds (1999) – coexist simultaneously, differing in what is calculated and how the calculation is executed. Crucially, the various methods yield different complexity results (for an overview consult Peliti & Vulpiani 1988, Badii & Politi 1997, Rescher 1998, Edmonds 1999, Shalizi 2006, and Mitchell 2009). Similarly, linguists have not reached an agreement as for how language complexity should be measured and compared (Newmeyer & Preston 2014: 7). Virtually every scholar develops an at least minimally different method of measurement. However, neither this disagreement nor the excessive proliferation of measurement techniques is surprising. They rather reflect the fact that natural languages constitute genuine com-

12The features analyzed in here are principally phonetic features. Therefore, I will use square bracket notation when writing about the sounds of Wymysiöeryś and the two control languages. However, I will occasionally refer to phonology as well. This phonetic orientation is motivated. First, scholarship still lacks a phonological analysis of the Wymysiöeryś language – all descriptions being virtually phonetic. Second, more generally, phonology is much more theory-dependent than phonetics (see that, in Polish, under certain theoretical premises, [i] and [ɘ/ɨ] are treated as a single phoneme despite being clearly distinct from an articulatory ̟ perspective and being indeed perceived as two distinct vowels by native speakers). Accordingly, all the inventories from other authors are phonetic (for instance, with respect to Standard Modern German see Johnson & Braber 2008, Fagan 2009, O'Brien & Fagan 2016; see also Eisenberg 1994, Dodd et al. 2003: 352) unless stated otherwise (for Modern High German see Russ 1994, Wiese 1996, and Fox 2005).

13Given the narrative approach adopted, the symbols ≈, ≤, and < reflect three types of relationships between *x* and *y*: similarity, minimal difference, and substantial difference (cf. Andrason et al. forthcoming).

plex systems, which renders any modeling fragmentary, provisional, and tentative, irrespective of how potent and sophisticated it is (Cilliers et al. 2013: 3, Andrason & Król 2016). With regard to the method adopted in this paper, a number of objections could be raised. First, absolute complexity is theory-oriented and, perhaps, heavily theory-dependent (Miestamo 2008: 24, Kusters 2008: 5, 8, Hammarström 2008: 289). It depends on the theories of language in which the description of grammar and its analysis are conducted (Miestamo 2008: 27, Kusters 2008: 5, 7–8, Hammarström 2008: 289). Second, local complexity allows for various manners of granularity. That is, each local complexity can be fragmentized into more atomic types, which inversely means that each local complexity constitutes global complexity from the perspective of more fragmentary levels of analysis. As a result, local but modular complexities are not free from three further problems typical of global complexity: sampling problems, commensurability problems, and modularity problems. Third, given the quantitative depth of a language, the account of all the details included in a single module and their quantification are unfeasible, both theoretically and practically (Miestamo 2006b: 30, 2008). Linguists rather determine a more or less restrictive sample of studied phenomena, limiting themselves to analyzing a set of distinctions or categories – rather than all of them. No universal methods of such delimitation exist and often detail-ness is determined by utilitarian aspects such as the aim of the analysis to be undertaken, the (maximal) feasibility of the research, and the scientist's theoretical paradigm (Deutscher 2009: 248). Fourth, even for modular complexity, it is uncertain how to commensurate the different features found in a single module and represent them in identical numerical terms, since each such term refers to qualitatively different phenomena and encapsulates, in principle, incomparable properties (see Miestamo 2006a,b, 2008: 30, 2009: 83). Fifth, dividing the module into distinct features or categories presupposes the highly problematic division of language into separate parts – for which local complexities are subsequently calculated. All those limitations – of which linguists are well aware – render the measurement of local complexities and that of modular complexity (i.e. global complexity at a module level), as well as their comparison across languages extremely difficult, if not elusive. My method partially responds to these problems. To mitigate theory-dependence, I am eclectic with regard to theory underlying the description of features. By taking into account a number of studies that follow different theoretical principles, I purposefully average the complexities inferred from the available descriptions. To mitigate granularity and sampling problems, the categories selected coincide with categories distinguished in general phonetic/phonological studies and with phonetic/phonological features usually described in comparative works on the Germanic and Slavonic language

families (Rothstein et al. 1993, Jacobs et al. 1994, Sussex & Cubberley 2006, Harbert 2007). Lastly, to mitigate the commensurability problem, I use a narrative method instead of a strictly numerical one. The problem of modularity cannot be mitigated, as the division of the sound-system module into separated units is presupposed by the method used in my study.

Additionally, there are two problems related to the control systems used in estimating the changes in complexity of Wymysiöeryś. First, the data related to the sound systems of Middle High German and Modern Standard German are secondary and draw on the studies presented by other scholars. Although all these studies are generally recognized in Germanic scholarship as authoritative, the information presented in them need not be exhaustive. This especially applies to Middle High German as this language may have contained some features that have not been reported thus far. The results of my comparison of Wymysiöeryś with Middle High German are inevitably contingent on the other linguists' views of Middle High German and their interpretation of direct textual evidence. This type of risk is unavoidable in typological and diachronic studies when one must rely on others' data and analyses. Second, Middle High German itself is an umbrella term that encompasses a number of German varieties that (a) were spoken between the 11th/12th and 14th/15th centuries; (b) were successors of Old High German; and (c) entirely or partially underwent the second consonant shift. This means that the grammatical repertoire of Middle High German is possibly richer than the repertoire of any single German variety that was spoken between the 11th/12th and 14th/15th centuries. To put it simply, while Wymysiöeryś is a single variety of East Middle German, Middle High German is a conglomerate of many varieties. Again, this problem is typical of studies that compare modern languages with old, classical, and extinct languages (see Andrason et al. forthcoming).

# **3 Evidence**

The Wymysiöeryś language described below is a heterogenous and internally diversified linguistic system. Most sources employed make reference to Wymysiöeryś spoken at the time of its near extinction, i.e. at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century (Lasatowicz 1994, Wicherkiewicz 1998, 2003, Zieniukowa & Wicherkiewicz 2001, Ritchie 2012, Weckwerth 2015, Żak 2016, 2019). When describing this modern Wymysiöeryś variety, I will widely draw on an original database developed over the course of more than fifteen years of fieldwork activities conducted by Tymoteusz Król and myself. This primary evidence

has been the foundation of several of the papers that I have published alone or in collaboration with Król (in particular Andrason 2014b,a, 2015, Andrason & Król 2016). I will refer extensively to the findings of those studies.14 Additionally, the data presented will draw on three works dedicated to pre-war Wymysiöeryś – the stage at which true endangerment had already began, even though it was still less pronounced than it is currently (Kleczkowski 1920, 1921, Mojmir 1930–1936, and Wicherkiewicz 2003, who describes the language used by Florian Biesik in his poems, the majority of which were written between 1920 and 1924). The evidence related to Middle High German and Modern Standard German is secondary and draws on canonical studies dedicated to these two languages and the (West) Germanic linguistic family. In particular, regarding Middle High German: Wright (1917), de Boor & Wisniewski (1973), Simmler (1985), Paul (2007), Hennings (2012), and Hall (2017). Regarding Modern Standard German: Hall (1992, 2000), Russ (1994), Eisenberg (1994), Wiese (1996), Dodd et al. (2003), Fox (2005), Johnson & Braber (2008), Fagan (2009), Caratini (2009), and O'Brien & Fagan (2016), and generally (West) Germanic: Iverson & Salmons (1995, 1999, 2003, 2008), Goblirsch (1997, 2018), Harbert (2007), van der Hoek (2010), and van Oostendorp (2019).

In this section, I will first determine the value of the twelve local complexities of Wymysiöeryś in relation to the two control systems (Section 3.1 – Section 3.12). Next, I will estimate the relational complexity of the three languages at the global level of the sound-system module (Section 3.13).

#### **3.1 Monophthongs**

Depending on the study, the number of monophthongs in Wymysiöeryś varies. The highest number attested is 15. The lowest number is 9. Most analyses distinguish well above ten vowels. Maximal systems have been proposed by Andrason & Król (2016), Kleczkowski (1920) and Mojmir (1930–1936). Andrason & Król (2016: 20) identify fifteen core vowels: [i], [ɪ], [e], [ɛ], [a], [ɑ], [o], [ɔ], [u], [y], [ʏ], [ɘ], [ø], [œ], and [ə]. Kleczkowski (1920: 11–12, 171) and Mojmir (1930–1936: ̟ xii–xiii) recognize thirteen vowels: [i], [ɪ] [e], [ɛ], [a], [ɑ], [o], [ɔ], [u], [ʊ] [y], [ʏ], [ə].15 Systems of twelve monophthongs are proposed by Lasatowicz (1994), Zie-

14The informants who have participated in the empirical research conducted by Król and myself, and whose language is reflected in previously published articles as well as in this paper, are (or were) fluent native speakers of Wymysiöeryś (see Section 1).

15The phonetic interpretation in IPA terminology is mine. Kleczkowski (1920) offers detailed descriptions which allow for such an interpretation. Given the limitations in space, I will not provide examples of phonetic/phonological features in words and/or constructions. These may be found in the works referred to in each section.

niukowa & Wicherkiewicz (2001), Wicherkiewicz (2003), and Andrason (2014a). Lasatowicz (1994: 32–41) distinguishes: [i], [e], [ɛ], [a], [ɑ], [o], [ɔ], [u], [y], [ʏ], [ø], [ə]. Zieniukowa & Wicherkiewicz (2001: 499–500) distinguish: [i], [e], [ɛ], [a], [ɑ], [o], [u], [y], [ʏ], [ø], [ə], and [ɨ]. Wicherkiewicz (2003: 407) distinguishes the same set of vowels merely replacing [o] with [ɔ]. Andrason (2014a: 126–127) distinguishes: [i], [ɪ], [e], [ɛ], [a], [ɑ], [o], [ɔ], [u], [y], [ʏ], and [ø]. The most reduced systems of monophthongs are postulated by Weckwerth (2015) and Ritchie (2012) who discern nine vowels: [i], [ɨ], [e], [ʏ], [ø], [a], [ɑ], [ɔ], and [u].16

The vocalic inventory of Middle High German consists of at least nine basic short monophthongs: *a* [a], *e* [e], *ë* (transcribed as [ë]), *ä* [ɛ], *i* [i], *o* [o], ö [ø], *u* [u], and *ü* [y] (Wright 1917: 2–5, Simmler 1985: 1131, 1133, de Boor & Wisniewski 1973: 36–37, 41, Paul 2007: 62–63, 87–97, Hall 2017: 9, Schmidt 2017: 69).17 Additionally, the reduced vowel *e* [ə] was used in unaccented syllables (Wright 1917: 3, Simmler 1985: 1133, Hall 2017: 9). The language also had long vowels (see Section 3.5 below), of which some may have exhibited slightly different qualities when compared to their short counterparts, apart from distinctive quantity (Wright 1917: 3, Caratini 2009: 185; cf. Hall 2017: 9 and Schmidt 2017: 69). This would increase the total number of monophthongs to maximally eighteen vowels. The vocalic system of Modern Standard German includes 15 vowels of different qualities: [iː], [ɪ], [yː], [ʏ], [eː], [øː], [ɛ(ː)], [œ], [uː], [ʊ], [oː], [ɔ], [a(ː)], [ə] and [ɐ] (Fagan 2009: 7, 17, Johnson & Braber 2008: 109–110, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 17–19; see also Russ 1994: 119, Wiese 1996: 19–21, and Fox 2005: 35, 41 who analyze the vocalic phonemes of Modern Standard German). In some studies, additional sounds [ɑ] (Eisenberg 1994: 350, Dodd et al. 2003: 3, Johnson & Braber 2008: 110, Caratini 2009: 71) and [æː], as different in quality from [ɛ], are distinguished (Fox 2005: 35–36, 38).18

Overall, monophthongs (*M*) are typical features of both Wymysiöeryś and the two control languages. Quantitatively, the number of monophthongs in Wymysiöeryś is (with minor disturbances) similar to that of Modern Standard German and Middle High German. Therefore, the complexity of monophthongs in the three languages can be viewed as approximately equal: *MW* ≈ *MMHG* and *MW* ≈ *MMSG*. 19

16Lasatowicz (1994) limits his set of vowels to eight sounds of an uncertain phonetic interpretation: *i*, *e*, *o*, *ó*, *ö*, *u*, *a*, *y*. Given the lack of linguistic training of its author, this system cannot be regarded as trustful (see a similar observation in Wicherkiewicz 2003).

17On the status of the vowels *e* (closed), *ë* (mid-open), and *ä* (open), consult Simmler (1985: 1132, 1134; see also Wright 1917: 2–5, de Boor & Wisniewski 1973: 36–37, 41, Paul 2007: 87–91). In a few studies, the number of vowels is reduced to seven (Caratini 2009: 184–185).

18Note that Fox (2005) analyzes phonemes. Sporadically, in unassimilated English borrowings, one finds two additional vowels, namely [æ] and [ʌ] (Fox 2005: 53, Caratini 2009: 73).

19The following abbreviations will be used in this paper: W – Wymysiöeryś; MHG – Middle High German; MSG – Modern Standard German.

#### **3.2 Diphthongs**

The number of Wymysiöeryś diphthongs varies between nine and six.20 Kleczkowski (1920: 12–13) and Mojmir (1930–1936: xiii–xiv) distinguish nine diphthongs: [ieː], [i ̯ ɛː], [aj], [oj], [ə(ː)j], [ou], [au], [uøː] / [uːø], and [uːə]. ̯ 21 Systems of eight diphthongs are proposed by Lasatowicz (1994), Wicherkiewicz (2003), and Zieniukowa & Wicherkiewicz (2001). Specifically, Lasatowicz (1994: 33, 40–41) distinguishes: [i(ː)ə ], [eːi ], [a͡e], [a͡o], [ɔ͡ø], [ø(ː)ə ], [y(ː)ə ], and [u(ː)ə ]. Wicherkiewicz (2003: 407–408) distinguishes: [i(ː)ə ], [eːi ], [ae], [ao], [ɔø], [ø(ː)ə ], [y(ː)ə ] and [uə ]. Zieniukowa & Wicherkiewicz (2001: 499–500) distinguish: [ai], [ye], [ɪ ̯ ɨ], [ɨj], ̯ [au], [øe], [øo], and [ue]. Systems of six diphthongs are formulated by Andrason & Król (2016) and Weckwerth (2015). Andrason & Król's system (2016: 21) contains [ai], [ei ̯ ], [ɔi ̯ ], [œʏ ̯ ], [i ̯ ø] and [ɪ ̯ ɘ̯], while Weckwerth's system (2015: 1) ̟ includes [aɪ], [eɪ], [ɔʏ], [øə], [yø] and [ɪə].

The system of diphthongs in Middle High German tends to consist of six sounds: *ei*, *ou*, *öu* (*öi*, *öü*), *ie*, *uo*, and *üe* (Wright 1917: 2–3, 5–6, 17, de Boor & Wisniewski 1973: 39–41, 45, Simmler 1985: 1133, Paul 2007: 62–63, 103–108, Hall 2017: 9, Schmidt 2017: 69). Their phonetic interpretation is most likely [ei], [ou ̯ ̯], [øy̆], [ie], [uo ̯ ̯], and [ye], respectively (Paul 2007: 103–108, Hall 2017: 9). Some linguists ̯ expand this system to nine sounds, adding the diphthongs *au* [aʊ], *eu* [ɔʏ]/[ɔɪ], and *ui* [uɪ] (Caratini 2009: 185). In Modern Standard German, the number of genuine diphthongs has decreased to three: [aɪ], [aʊ], and [ɔɪ] (Eisenberg 1994: 354, Dodd et al. 2003: 4, Johnson & Braber 2008: 112–113, Fagan 2009: 9, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 19). However, a new wave of diphthongs has also emerged due to the vocalic pronunciation of *r* as [ɐ] and the assimilation of loanwords ending in *-ion* and *-ation*. As a result, the inventory of diphthongs has been enriched by [i:ɐ], [u:ɐ], [e:ɐ], and [io:] (Eisenberg 1994: 354, Fox 2005: 53–54, Fagan 2009: ̯ 9).22

Overall, both Wymysiöeryś and the two control languages contain diphthongs (*D*). Moreover, quantitatively, the number of diphthongs found in Wymysiöeryś, on the one hand, and those present in Middle High German and Modern Standard German, on the other hand, are similar. As a result, the complexity of diphthongs is approximately equal in the three languages: *D W* ≈ *D MHG* and *D W* ≈ *D MSG*.

20The largest set of fourteen diphthongs is posited by Latosiński (1909: 270): *ia*, *iu*, *iy*, *ie*, *uö*, *uy*, *oe*, *oi*, *ou*, *ei*, *ae*, *aei*, *au*, *yi*. (cf. Wicherkiewicz 2003: 411). As in Section 3.1, I will disregard this system in my discussion.

21This system could be extended to ten sounds if [uøː] and [uːø] are viewed as different diphthongs.

22Two additional diphthongs, i.e. [eɪ] and [oʊ], may appear in unadjusted English loanwords (Caratini 2009: 73).

#### **3.3 Triphthongs**

The Wymysiöeryś vocalic system contains one true triphthong, i.e. a sequence of three vocalic elements (usually glide, vowel, and glide) used within the same nucleus. This triphthong is [ʏøœ̯], noted alternatively as [ ̯ yøœ̯] or [yøə] (Andrason 2014a: 126, Andrason & Król 2016: 23).

True triphthongs are absent in Middle High German (Hall 2017: 10). Neither Wright (1917), de Boor & Wisniewski (1973), Simmler (1985), Paul (2007), nor Schmidt (2017) mention them in their grammatical analyses. Similarly, there are no true triphthongs in Modern Standard German. Accordingly, they do not feature in works dedicated to German phonetics (see Eisenberg 1994, Johnson & Braber 2008, Fagan 2009, and O'Brien & Fagan 2016) and phonology (see Russ 1994, Wiese 1996, and Fox 2005).

Overall, the category of triphthongs (*T*) is only instantiated in Wymysiöeryś. Hence, by definition, the complexity of triphthongs in the two control languages is strictly lower than in Wymysiöeryś: *T W* > *T MHG* and *T W* > *T MSG*.

#### **3.4 Vocalic sonorants**

A syllable – and in particular its nucleus – can be formed in Wymysiöeryś not only by genuine vowels, but by sonorants as well. Five sonorants can be syllabic or vocalic: [l], [r ̩ ], [n ̩ ̩], [m̩], and [ŋ̬̍] (Kleczkowski 1920: 12, Mojmir 1930–1936: xiii). By far, the most common are [l] and [n ̩ ̩] (Andrason 2021).

The sound system of Middle High German most likely lacked syllabic or vocalic sonorants, as the Proto-Indo-European [n̩], [m̩], [l], and [r ̩ ] developed a full ̩ vocalic component, namely *u*, *o*, *ü*, or *ö* (from Old High German *o* and *u*, and an earlier Germanic \**u*) (Paul 2007: 62, 66, 146–150; see also de Boor & Wisniewski 1973: 48). A possible case, where the presence of syllabic sonorants has been hypothesized, involves the metathesis of *ər* into *rə* through an 'r' stage (Paul 2007: ̩ 147). Even if a few (highly debatable) instances of syllabic sonorants could be hypothesized, the relevance of such sounds was minimal for the vocalic system of Middle High German. In contrast, syllabic liquids ([l] and [r ̩ ]) and syllabic nasals ̩ ([n̩], [m̩], [ŋ̬̍]) are a common feature of Modern Standard German, where they arose due to the reduction of *shwa* (Fagan 2009: 24, 32, Johnson & Braber 2008: 130–131, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 18).

Overall, the category of syllabic/vocalic sonorants (*S*) is instantiated in Wymysiöeryś and one of the control languages. It is present in Modern High German but absent in Middle High German. The number of syllabic/vocalic sonorants

found in Wymysiöeryś and Modern Standard German are quantitatively similar. Therefore, the complexity of syllabic/vocalic sonorants is approximately equal in these two languages: *S W* ≈ *S MSG*. In contrast, the complexity relationship between Wymysiöeryś and Middle High German is that of strict inequality: *S W* > *S MHG*.

#### **3.5 Vocalic length**

Most studies recognize the presence of long vowels and the significance of vocalic length in Wymysiöeryś. Their most fervent advocates are Kleczkowski (1920) and Mojmir (1930–1936). Kleczkowski (1920: 174) argued that, contrary to contemporary Polish, length was a part of the vocalic system of Wymysiöeryś, and that the opposition between short and long vowels was fundamental from a systemic perspective (Kleczkowski 1920: 11–12, 26–27). In fact, Kleczkowski (1920: 26) distinguishes four grades of length, splitting long and short vowels into two subclasses each: extra-long and long, on the one hand; and middle and short, on the other hand. In his model, the following monophthongs can be long or extra-long: [iː], [eː], [ɛː], [aː], [ɑː], [oː], [ɔː], [uː], [yː] (Kleczkowski 1920: 11–12, 26–27). More reduced systems of long vowels are discerned by Lasatowicz (1994), Zieniukowa & Wicherkiewicz (2001), and Wicherkiewicz (2003). Lasatowicz (1994: 40–41) distinguishes seven long vowels: [iː], [ɑː], [eː], [oː], [yː], [øː], [uː]. Zieniukowa & Wicherkiewicz (2001: 499–500) distinguish six long vowels: [iː], [eː], [ɑː], [uː], [yː], and [øː]. Wicherkiewicz (2003: 405–407) distinguishes five long vowels: [iː], [ɑː], [eː], [uː], [yː], [øː]. The relevance of vocalic length is also acknowledged by Andrason & Król (2016: 27–28). In contrast, Weckwerth (2015: 1–2) suggests that vocalic length, even though present, has a limited distinctive role, as the main contrast between vowels involves quality rather than quantity.23

Length was a relevant and contrastive feature of the vocalic system of Middle High German (Simmler 1985: 1133, Seiler 2005). In addition to short singletons (see Section 3.1), the language possessed eight long vowels: *â* [aː], *æ* [æː], *ê* (*ie*) [eː], *î* [iː], *ô* (*uo*) [oː], *oe* (*üe*) [øː], *û* [uː], and *iu* [yː] (Wright 1917: 2–7, de Boor & Wisniewski 1973: 37–38, 41, Simmler 1985: 1133, Paul 2007: 62–63, 97–100, Hall 2017: 9, Schmidt 2017: 69). As mentioned in Section 3.1, the short and long vowels likely exhibited at least minimal qualitative differences (Wright 1917: 3,

23My recent studies and fieldwork in Wilamowice show that long vowels are a constant feature of Wymysiöeryś, although contrast between short and long monophthongs often involves at least minimal changes in quality. See words like *fooł* [fo:w] 'grey, gray-haired', or the pair *hoon* [ho:n] 'rooster' versus *hon* [hɔn]/[hon] 'roosters'.

Caratini 2009: 185, Hall 2017: 9, and Schmidt 2017: 69). Length also plays an important role in Modern Standard German, where vowels differ both in quality and quantity (Fagan 2009: 7–9, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 17, 19; see also the short and long phonemes in Russ 1994: 118–119 and Wiese 1996, Fox 2005: 39–41).24 Length is responsible for the systemic division of all vowels into 'lax' and 'tense'. Lax vowels are always short, while tense vowels are long in a stressed position. The tense long vowels comprise eight sounds: [iː], [eː], [ɛː], [a/ɑː], [oː], [uː], [yː], and [øː] (Eisenberg 1994: 350–352, Johnson & Braber 2008: 109–110, Fagan 2009: 7–9, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 17, 19; see also Russ 1994: 118–119, Wiese 1996: 19–21, Fox 2005: 38–39, 41, and their discussion of long vowel phonemes) sometimes expanded by an additional vowel [æː] (Fox 2005: 35–36, 38).25

Overall, the category of vocalic length (*VL*) is instantiated in both Wymysiöeryś and the two control systems. The number of long vowels in the two groups is similar. As a result, the complexity of vocalic length in Wymysiöeryś, Middle High German, and Modern Standard German is approximately equal: *VLW* ≈ *VLMHG* and *VLW* ≈ *VLMSG*.

### **3.6 Nasality**

The Wymysiöeryś vocalic system is characterized by the presence of nasal and/or nasalized vowels. The most common nasal sounds are the vowels [ɔ] and *ę* [ɛ] and three nasal approximants [w̃], [ɰ], [ȷ] that can accompany oral vowels (Andrason 2021). Sporadically, vowels [ã/ɑ] and [ẽ] are used (Andrason 2021). The actual nasal feature, and thus the nasalization of a vowel, may vary from strong (a genuine nasal vowel) to weak (a slightly nasalized oral vowel with a nasal consonant; see Kleczkowski 1920: 12, Mojmir 1930–1936: xiii).

Nasal vowels were absent in Middle High German (Wright 1917, Paul 2007, de Boor & Wisniewski 1973). Their position in Modern Standard German is similarly weak. In general, "German vowels are oral [and no] nasal vowel belongs to the core vocalic system" (Caratini 2009: 71). Nasalized vowels – [ɛ(ː)], [ɔ(ː)], [ɑ(ː)], [œ̃(ː)] – are only found in loanwords from French (Fagan 2009: 9–10, Caratini 2009: 51, 73–74, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 22). Even there, however, a pronunciation with an oral vowel and a nasal consonant is grammatical (Russ 1994: 78, Fox 2005: 53, Fagan 2009: 9, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 22). Being "unstable" and restricted to a small number of words of foreign origin, the role of nasal vowels in the vowel

24That is, both quality and length are used to differentiate sounds and ultimately lexemes (Eisenberg 1994: 352, Dodd et al. 2003: 3, Johnson & Braber 2008: 109, Fagan 2009: 7–9, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 17–19).

25As always, Fox's (2005) analysis concerns phonology.

system of Modern Standard German is marginal (Fox 2005: 53, Fagan 2009: 10, Johnson & Braber 2008: 90).

Overall, the category of nasality (*N*) is instantiated in Wymysiöeryś and one of the control languages, i.e. Modern Standard German. However, the number of nasal vowels and their systemic relevance is greater in Wymysiöeryś than in Modern Standard German.26 Hence, the complexity relationship between these two languages is of a strict-inequality type, i.e. *N W* > *N MSG*. This strict inequality is even more evident if Wymysiöeryś is compared to Middle High German: *N W* > *N MHG*.

### **3.7 Consonants**

Both quantitatively and qualitatively, the consonantal system of Wymysiöeryś is remarkable. The size of the fundamental system of consonants oscillates between thirty and thirty-nine sounds. Due to palatalizing processes (see Section 3.9), this system may be expanded to more than fifty. As far as "non-palatalized" models are considered, the maximal system is posited by Andrason & Król (2016: 17–18). To be exact, Andrason & Król (2016) distinguish thirty-nine sounds: (a) plosives: [p], [b], [t], [d], [c], [ɟ], [k], [g], and [ʔ]; (b) fricatives: [f], [v], [s], [z], [ɕ], [ʑ], [s], [z ̠ ], [ʃ], [ʒ], [x], and [h]; (c) nasals: [m], [n], [ȵ], and [ŋ]; (d) liquids [l] ̠ and [r]; (e) affricates: [ts], [dz], [ʨ], [ʥ], [ṯs], [ḏz ̠ ], [tʃ], [dʒ]; and approximants: ̠ [w] and [j].27 A similarly abundant system of thirty-four consonants was proposed by Kleczkowski (1920: 13–14) and Mojmir (1930–1936: xiv–xv). The main difference consists in the presence of [ɫ] instead of [w]28 and the absence of the distinction between the postalveolars [s], [z ̠ ], [ṯs ̠ ], [ḏz ̠ ] and the palatalo-alveolars ̠ [ʃ], [ʒ], [tʃ], [dʒ]. More reduced consonantal systems are proposed by Wicherkiewicz (2003) and Lasatowicz (1994). Wicherkiewicz (2003: 406–409) distinguishes thirty consonants. He expands the set of consonants by [pf] and [ç], on the one hand, but prescinds from [l], [ɟ], [ʔ] and the distinction between the postalveolars [s], [z ̠ ], [ṯs ̠ ], [ḏz ̠ ] and the palatalo-alveolars [ʃ], [ʒ], [tʃ], [dʒ], on the one ̠ hand.29 Lasatowicz (1994: 36, 42, 52) also distinguishes thirty consonants. Similar to Wicherkiewicz (2003), Lasatowicz's system contains the sound [ç] but

26That is, fewer sounds can be nasal and the feature of nasality is generally less common.

27The set of approximants may be extended to [ɰ] which occurs before nasals (Andrason & Król 2016: 17–18, Andrason 2021).

28At the beginning of the 20th century, *ł* was still pronounced as a velarized alveolar lateral approximant [ɫ] rather than approximant [w] as it is the rule currently (Kleczkowski 1920: 13, 121–126, Mojmir 1930–1936: xiv, Wicherkiewicz 2003: 406, Żak 2019, see Section 4.4).

29Note that [ʥ], [ḏz], [dʒ], [ʑ] are unattested in Biesik's poems (Wicherkiewicz 2003: 408–409). ̠

fails to include consonants [c], [ɟ], [ʔ], [ȵ] and to make the distinction between the postalveolars [s], [z ̠ ], [ṯs ̠ ], [ḏz ̠ ] and the palatalo-alveolars [ʃ], [ʒ], [tʃ], [dʒ]. ̠ 30 Since nearly all consonants (except [ʔ] and [h]) have their palatal(ized) variants (see Section 3.9; see also Kleczkowski 1920: 15, Mojmir 1930–1936, Andrason & Król 2016), the system of consonants may be extended to fifty-one sounds – or even more – by incorporating, for instance, [pj ], [bj ], [tj ], [dj ], [mj ], [ŋj ], [fj ], [vj ], [lj ]/[ʎ], [xj ]/[ç], [rj ] and [wj ] (Andrason 2021).

The system of consonants exhibited by Middle High German most likely contained twenty-four sounds. Specifically, (a) plosives: [p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g]; (b) fricatives: [f], [v], [s], [ʃ], [ʒ] (or [z]), [j], [ç], [x], and [h]; (c) nasals: [m], [n], [ŋ]; (d) liquids: [l], [r] (Paul 2007: 141, 169–171); (e) affricates [pf], [ts], [kx] (de Boor & Wisniewski 1973: 18–19, Simmler 1985: 1135, Paul 2007: 141); and possibly an approximant [w] (Wright 1917: 24, Simmler 1985: 1135). Additionally, some studies expand this system by [β] (de Boor & Wisniewski 1973: 18). The consonantal inventory of Modern Standard German includes the following twenty-seven sounds: (a) plosives: [p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g], [ʔ]; (b) fricatives: [f], [v], [s], [z], [ʃ], [ʒ] (the last sound is often treated as peripheral), [ç], [j] (also defined as an approximant), [x], [ʁ], [h]; (c) nasals: [m], [n], [ŋ]; and (d) liquids: [l], [r], [ʀ]; and (e) affricates: [pf], [ts], [tʃ] (Eisenberg 1994: 353–355, Johnson & Braber 2008: 92, 99–101, 104, Fagan 2009: 10–14, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 13–16). If the affricate [dʒ] (O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 16) and the nasal [ɱ] (Hall 2000) are included, the number of consonants increases to twenty-nine "basic" sounds (see also the more phonologically oriented analyses offered by Russ 1994: 112–115, 121–122; Wiese 1996: 22–26, Hall 2000: 31, and Fox 2005: 35–37).

Overall, the category of consonants (*C*) is instantiated in both Wymysiöeryś and the two control languages. However, whether maximal (extended) or minimal (basic), the number of Wymysiöeryś consonants is always larger, in certain models radically, than the number of consonants found in Middle High German and Modern Standard German. As a result, the complexity of consonants in Wymysiöeryś is substantially greater than in the control languages, i.e. *C W* > *C MHG* and *C W* > *C MSG*.

### **3.8 Consonantal length**

Consonantal length belongs to the phonetic repertoire of Wymysiöeryś, although different studies ascribe it a distinct systemic relevance. According to Kleczkowski (1920: 15) and Mojmir (1930–1936: xv), although attested, long consonants are not particularly common. In contrast, Wicherkiewicz (2003: 405–407) identifies

30Latosiński (1909: 270) distinguishes twenty-six consonants.

a number of long consonants in Biesik's poems (namely, [mː], [fː], [pː], [kː], [tː], [t͡sː], and [ɫː]) and notes that they are still pronounced at least "slightly longer" than their short counterparts by modern speakers Wicherkiewicz (2003: 407). I have detected a relatively large set of long consonants in my own field work, namely: nasals [nː], [ȵː], [m]; fricatives: [sː], [zː], [fː]; stops: [pː], [tː], [kː]; and affricates [t͡sː] and [d͡z/d͡ʒː]; as well as [rː] (Andrason 2021). Although long consonants also allow for a shortened pronunciation as singletons, consonantal length seems to be a regular feature of the Wymysiöeryś sound system.

Long or geminated consonants were a typical component of Middle High German (Wright 1917: 25, 27–28, 30–31, Simmler 1985: 1134–1135, Goblirsch 1997, 2018, Jessen 1998: 334, Paul 2007: 141), where the length played, to an extent, a phonemic function (Fourquet 1963: 85–88, Moosmüller & Brandstätter 2015). The following long consonantal sounds are usually identified for Middle High German: *pp* [pː], *bb* [bː], *tt* [tː]; *gg* [gː], *ff* [fː], *ss* [sː], *mm* [mː], *nn* [nː], *ll* [lː], and *rr* [rː] (Wright 1917: 25, Paul 2007: 141). The set of long consonants is often extended by [ʃː], [xː], and [kː] (Simmler 1985: 1135, Paul 2007: 142, 171, for a discussion consult Goblirsch 1997, 2018 and Paul 2007: 141–175). Modern Standard German has no geminate or long consonants "at the phonetic level" (Caratini 2009: 70, Goblirsch 2018). The only consonantal sounds present in the language are thus singletons (Caratini 2009: 70, Fagan 2009) and spelling them with double consonants generally indicates that a preceding vowel is short (Russ 1994: 118, 140).

Overall, the category of consonantal length (*CL*) is instantiated in Wymysiöeryś and one of the control languages, i.e. Middle High German. It is absent in Modern Standard German. The number of long consonants in Wymysiöeryś and Middle High German is relatively similar and, thus, their respective complexities may be viewed as approximately equal, i.e. *CLW* ≈ *CLMHG*. The comparison between Wymysiöeryś and Modern Standard German reveals the relation of strict inequality, i.e. *CLW* > *CLMSG*.

#### **3.9 Palatalization**

A palatalization-based opposition between the so-called hard (non-palatal(ized)) and soft (palatal(ized)) consonants is a pervasive and essential component of the Wymysiöeryś sound system (Kleczkowski 1920, Anders 1933, Wicherkiewicz 2003: 402, 405–409, Andrason 2021). Virtually every non-palatal(ized) hard sound possesses its palatal(ized) soft counterpart (Kleczkowski 1920: 15, Mojmir 1930– 1936: xv, Andrason & Król 2016). Apart from the alveolo-palatal (or palatalized postalveolar) sounds (i.e. the fricatives [ɕ] and [ʑ], the affricates [tɕ] and [dʑ], and the nasal [ȵ]), Wymysiöeryś exhibits the following palatal(ized) consonants, each contrastive with a hard equivalent: [pj ] – [p], [bj ] – [b], [tj ] – [t], [dj ] – [d], [kj ]/[c] – [k], [gj ]/[ɟ] – [g], [mj ] – [m], [ŋj ] – [ŋ], [fj ] – [f], [vj ] – [v], [lj ]/[ʎ] – [l], [xj ]/[ç] – [x], [rj ] – [r], and [wj ] – [w]. Palatalization also plays a relevant role in the morphology of Wymysiöeryś, for instance, triggering the use of an allomorphic ending -*ja* instead of *-a* in inflectional forms of nouns and adjectives, e.g. *ryk* [rɘk] 'back' – dat.pl. ̟ *rykja* [rɘc(ː)a] (Andrason 2014a, 2015, Andrason & Król ̟ 2016). This large number of palatal(ized) consonants and their extensive use in the lexicon and grammar give the Wymysiöeryś language a soft resonance, fully comparable to Polish, but noticeably distinct from German (Kleczkowski 1920; see also Latosiński 1909: 271–272).31

Palatalization operated in Middle High German residually. The most evident palatalizing process affected the consonant *s* that was softened to [ʃ] before the consonants *k*, *l*, *m*, *n*, *p*, *t*, *w* (Paul 2007, Fagan 2009: 196, 209, Hennings 2012: 41). Additionally, *g* was palatalized to *j* (Paul 2007: 37). Modern Standard German fails to exploit palatalization and palatal(ized) consonants to an extent that would be comparable to that attested in Wymysiöeryś. The most evident case of palatalization is the softening of [x] to [ç] (Fagan 2009: 26–27, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 45). The language also contains other palatal sounds, namely [j], [ʃ] and [ʒ] (Johnson & Braber 2008: 92, 95, 104, Fagan 2009: 9, 12–13, van der Hoek 2010, O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 14, 16).

Overall, the category of palatalization (*P*) is instantiated in Wymysiöeryś and the two control languages. However, the number of palatalized consonants and the systemic effects of palatalization are far more significant in Wymysiöeryś than in Middle High German and Modern Standard German. Hence, palatalization is substantially more complex in Wymysiöeryś than in the control languages: *P W* > *P MHG* and *P W* > *P MSG*.

### **3.10 Aspiration**

In Wymysiöeryś, voiceless plosive consonants /p/, /t/, /k/ fail to be aspirated in a word-initial position, and in all other positions (however, see further below), thus appearing as [p], [t], [k] (Kleczkowski 1920: 14–15, 28, Mojmir 1930–1936: xiv–xv, Andrason & Król 2016: 17–19). This means that they contrast with /b/, /d/, /g/ in terms of voicing as in Polish (*jak w polskiem*) (Kleczkowski 1920: 28), the latter series being pronounced voiced in word-initial and word-internal position (Andrason & Król 2016: 17–19).32 An analogous situation is found in Biesik's

31The perception of Wymysiöeryś as a soft language – and in that regard equal to Polish – is a usual reaction when a non-Wymysiöeryś speaker who is familiar with German (and Polish) is exposed to the Wymysiöeryś language.

32In a final position, /b/, /d/, and /g/ are generally devoiced, and thus their opposition with /p/, /t/, and /k/ is neutralized.

poems where /p/, /t/, /k/ were unaspirated, and the opposition with /b/, /d/, /g/ involved the feature of voicing only (Wicherkiewicz 2003: 399–409). Aspiration is also absent in the Wymysiöeryś variety described by Lasatowicz (1994: 42).33 Only sporadically, a soft aspiration of /p/, /t/, and /k/ is audible in a word-final position (Andrason & Król 2016: 19).

In studies on Middle High German, the opposition between /p/, /t/, /k/ and /b/, /d/, /g/ is generally viewed in terms of tenseness (Goblirsch 1997, 2018, Jessen 1998) – alternatively referred to as "spread glottis" (Harbert 2007: 44, Iverson & Salmons 2003: 44, 2008) – that is, *fortis* versus *lenis* (Simmler 1985: 1134, Weddige 2007: 18, Hennings 2012: 8–10, Paul 2007: 131, 141, Moosmüller & Brandstätter 2015). However, the determination of the precise phonetic nature of this opposition is elusive. Most likely, the contrast translated onto a set of phenomena, such as force, quantity, voicing, and aspiration, all of them characterized by distinct degrees of relevance (Simmler 1985: 1133–1135). The most relevant of them were articulatory force (Wright 1917: 22–23, Weddige 2007: 18) and quantitative augmentation (Goblirsch 1997, 2018, Jessen 1998: 334; see also Simmler 1985: 1135) – both related to intensity. Often, voicing is considered the third crucial property correlated with tenseness (de Boor & Wisniewski 1973: 18, Simmler 1985: 1133, Weddige 2007: 19, Seiler 2009, Hennings 2012: 8–10). In contrast, even though aspiration is apparently "inherent" to the Germanic family (Iverson & Salmons 2003: 44, Iverson & Salmons 2008: 2), its role in Middle High German was secondary and the three *fortes* consonants were most likely not (fully) aspirated (Simmler 1985: 1133, Hennings 2012: 9; see also Paul 2007: 133). In Modern Standard German, the system of plosives is also based on the tenseness or spreadglottis contrast, such that the opposition between /p/, /t/, /k/ and /b/, / d/, /g/ is generally explained as *fortis* versus *lenis* (Russ 1994: 115, Wiese 1996, Jessen 1998: 22, 136, 142–143, Fox 2005: 42, Iverson & Salmons 2008: 3, Caratini 2009). The feature of tenseness is correlated primarily with aspiration, with /p/, /t/, /k/ being "heavily aspirated in prosodically prominent positions" (Iverson & Salmons 2008: 3), e.g. word-initially (Russ 1994: 115, 117, 121, Iverson & Salmons 2003, 2008, Fox 2005: 42, Caratini 2009).34 In this system, voicing is viewed as a secondary feature (Jessen 1998: 334).

33Lasatowicz (1994: 42) argues for a fortis-lenis distinction between /p/, /t/, /k/ and /b/, /d/, /g/, without explaining how this contrast should be understood in phonetic terms.

34Although most scholars reject voice as a distinctive feature in Modern Standard German, its relevance is also acknowledged (Wiese 1996: 169), since the series /b/, /d/, /g/ surfaces not only as unaspirated but also as partially voiced (Iverson & Salmons 2008: 3). Overall, the plosives contrast in both aspiration (primarily) and voicing (secondarily). The tense consonants /p/, /t/, /k/ are aspirated and/or unvoiced. The lax consonants /b/, /d/, /g/ are unaspirated and/or voiced (Jessen 1998: 43–44; see also Caratini 2009: 70).

Overall, the category of aspiration (*A*) is not instantiated (or very poorly instantiated) in Wymysiöeryś and Middle High German while it is present and central in Modern Standard German. Therefore, the complexity relationship between Wymysiöeryś and the control languages is as follows: *A W* ≈ *A MHG* and *A W* < *A MSG*.

#### **3.11 Onset clusters**

Wymysiöeryś tolerates elaborated consonant onsets (Andrason 2015: 71). Monosegmental onsets may exhibit all consonants except [ŋ].35 Bisegmental onsets exhibit a considerable variety, tolerating the following clusters: (a) stop + liquid/nasal/fricative/approximant; (b) fricative/liquid/nasal/fricative/stop/approximant/ affricate; and (c) affricate + liquid/nasal/fricative (Andrason 2021). Contrary to many West Germanic languages (see Section 4.7), Wymysiöeryś tolerates bisegmental onsets such as [tl] and [dl], onsets with a glide as their second segment [j/w], and onsets with a voiced sibilant as their first element, e.g. [zm], [ʒm], [ʒv]. Additionally, it contains other onsets rare in German and its relatives: [kʃ], [tf], [tx], [ps], [pʃ], [bʒ], [gʒ], [t͡ʃf], and [ʃt͡ʃ]. Three consonant onsets are also common in Wymysiöeryś, and a wide range of combinations are possible: stop + fricative + nasal (e.g. [bʒȵ]); fricative + fricative + stop (e.g. [fsp], [fst], [vzd], [vzg]); fricative + fricative + nasal (e.g. [vzm]); fricative + stop + fricative (e.g. [fkʃ], [stf]); fricative + stop + liquid (e.g. [skr], [spr], [str], [skn]; and [ʃkl], [ʃkr], [ʃpr], [ʃtr]). Although not particularly frequent, a few onsets composed of four consonants are attested, e.g. [vskʃ] and [pstr]. In addition to the quantitative complexity outlined above, Wymysiöeryś attests a significant qualitative variety of onset clusters. This is evident in the fact that the language tolerates not only sequences that conform to the sonority scale, but also those that violate it.36 Apart from clusters in which the first element is a sibilant [s] or [ʃ] (as is common in

35This means that contrary to Modern Standard German (see below), [ʃ] and [x] may form monosegmental onsets.

36The sonority scale depicts the increase in the relative sonority of sounds and their "vowellikeness" (Foley 1977, Clements 1990). Generally, the sonority increases from obstruents to vowels, via sonorants. A more fine-grained representation of the scale is as follows: voiceless stops > voiced stops > voiceless fricatives > voiced fricatives > nasals > l > r > glides / high vowels > low vowels (Harbert 2007: 65). This scale imposes sonority restrictions whereby, in onsets, consonants placed higher on the sonority scale may not occur before consonants placed lower on the sonority scale (Harbert 2007: 66, 68). In other words, the sonority of a syllable may not decrease from the left edge to its nucleus, but rather increases (Harbert 2007: 66, 68). Inversely, elements in codas must "decline in sonority toward the right edge of the syllable" (Harbert 2007: 73).

Germanic languages; see below), a large number of such "ill-formed" sequences is tolerated, especially: (a) fricative + stop + fricative (e.g. [fkʃ]) and (b) fricative + fricative + stop (e.g. [fsp], [fst], [vzd], [vzg]).

Middle High German maximally contains three consonants in onsets, which is typical of the Germanic family in general (Harbert 2007: 66, van Oostendorp 2019: 34). As elsewhere in the Germanic family (van Oostendorp 2019: 35), monosegmental onsets exhibit very few restrictions, e.g. [x], [ç], and [ŋ]. In biconsonantal onsets, sequences composed of an obstruent and a liquid are allowed with the exception of [tl] and [dl] (van Oostendorp 2019: 36, compare with Wymysiöeryś above). Other types of onsets are more restricted, with a number of combinations being disallowed, e.g. onsets with a glide as second segment [j/ʋ/w] and onsets composed of sibilants and voiced obstruents (cf. van Oostendorp 2019: 36–38). In general, conforming to the behavior exhibited by West Germanic languages, Middle High German complies with the sonority-based constraints (Harbert 2007: 68, 73), van Oostendorp 2019: 36) to a much larger extent than is the case in Wymysiöeryś. In Modern Standard German, monosegmental onsets tolerate most consonants with the exception of [x], [ŋ], and [ʃ] (Fox 2005: 58).37 For complex onsets, only doubles are relatively common. Two basic types can be discerned: obstruent (plosive, fricative, affricate) + liquid ([r/l]) and fricative (mostly, [ʃ]) + C (Fox 2005: 58). Specifically, the following combinations are grammatical: stop + liquid/nasal/fricative; fricative + liquid/nasal; and only for ʃ, fricative + fricative/stop (Veith et al. 1980: 133, Eisenberg 1994: 356, Russ 1994: 120). The only common second segments are sonorants (Fagan 2009: 35; see also O'Brien & Fagan 2016: 66, Hall 2000: 231). Additionally, affricates may combine with a liquid or a fricative (Fagan 2009: 35, 58). Triple onsets are scarce and highly restrictive, both qualitatively and quantitively (Kučera & Monroe 1968: 50). Only five permutations are grammatical (i.e. [skl], [skr], [ʃpl], [ʃpr], [ʃtr]), all of them of the type [s, ʃ] + stop + liquid (Fox 2005: 58, Fagan 2009: 36, Hall 1992: 69, 2000). Quadruple onsets are disallowed (Kučera & Monroe 1968: 50, Eisenberg 1994: 355, Fox 2005: 55; see also Wiese 1996). Onsets largely comply with the sonority scale principle (Wiese 1996: 260, Fox 2005: 60, van Oostendorp 2019: 36–37). The only common exceptions involve [ʃ] and [s] which may occur before stops (Fox 2005: 60, van Oostendorp 2019: 39–40).

Overall, consonant clusters (*OC*) in onsets are instantiated in Wymysiöeryś and the two control languages. However, onset clusters are significantly longer

37When describing the consonant clusters in Modern Standard German in Section 3.11 and Section 3.12, I will often refer to Russ (1994), Wiese (1996), Hall (2000), Fox (2005), and O'Brien & Fagan (2016). It should be noted that, in their discussion of phonotactics, these authors are principally concerned with phonemes.

(i.e. larger sequences are tolerated) and more varied (i.e. a more diverse set of combinations is grammatical) in Wymysiöeryś than in Middle High German and Modern Standard German. This yields the following complexity relationships between Wymysiöeryś and the control languages: *OCW* > *OCMHG* and *OCW* > *OCMSG*.

### **3.12 Coda clusters**

Wymysiöeryś allows for elaborated and qualitatively diversified consonant codas. All consonants are allowed in monosegmental codas with the exception of [ʔ] and [h], as well as voiced plosives, due to devoicing processes operating in a word-final position. Diverse combinations are also tolerated in codas composed of two consonants, including a large set of clusters containing the affricates [t͡s] and [t͡ʃ] and their variants (also resulting from the devoicing of /d͡z/ and /d͡ʒ/).38 Nevertheless, certain constraints operate, of which the most pervasive is the ungrammaticality of the final [j], [h], and [ʔ], as well as the avoidance of final voiced obstruents. Three-segment codas are also widely attested; however, they are only common in morphologically complex forms. Their presence in monomorphemic (i.e. non-inflected) lexemes is in contrast limited. The most common mono-morphemic three-segment codas are: [nft], [mpt], as well as [mpl] and [ndl] in cases where the final sonorants are not syllabic. The most common combinations found in pluri-morphemic words involve [Cst] and [CCt], which tend to arise in inflected forms of verbs (e.g. in the present tense and the preterite) and adjectives (e.g. superlative), e.g. [tst], [kst], [fst], [hst], [mst], [nst], [ŋst], [wst], [ŋkt], [wtst]. Four-consonant coda are also grammatical being attested exclusively in inflected forms of verbs and adjectives. The first element is always a sonorant, the second is a stop, while the third and fourth segments are usually filled by the cluster [st], e.g. [wdst], [lkst], [ntst], and [nkst]. Five-segment codas are generally avoided in Wymysiöeryś. Codas typically comply with the sonority scale principle. Common exceptions are clusters ending in a plosive and a sibilant, e.g. [ps] or [ks].

As is typical of West Germanic languages (van Oostendorp 2019: 40), in Middle High German, [h] and [ʔ] were disallowed in mono-segmental codas in a wordfinal position (Paul 2007: 161), as is, most likely, also true of the voiced plosives due to their final devoicing (Paul 2007: 19). Bi-segmental codas were common, and a diversified set of combinations was tolerated, e.g. liquid + obstruent (including [lt]) or nasal + obstruent (cf. van Oostendorp 2019: 41–42). Codas longer

38For example, one finds [t͡ʃt] and [t͡st] as the first segment, and [ʃt͡ʃ], [lt͡ʃ], [ȵt͡ʃ], [rt͡ʃ], [wt͡s], [lt͡s], [nt͡s], [rt͡s], [nd͡z] as the second segment (Andrason 2021).

than two consonants – i.e. triplets and quadruplets – usually emerge in forms that exhibit complex morphology, e.g. verbal, nominal, and adjectival inflections. The typical word-final element in complex codas are voiceless coronal obstruents as is the rule in West Germanic languages in general (van Oostendorp 2019: 43–44; for various examples in Middle High German see Paul 2007: 146–175). In Modern Standard German, all consonants, except [b], [d], [g], [v], [z], [j], [h], and [ʔ], are grammatical in monosegmental codas (Fox 2005: 59, van Oostendorp 2019: 41). Two-consonant codas also show minimal restrictions and a large variety of combinations are grammatical (Eisenberg 1994: 356, Russ 1994: 124–125). Specifically, bisegmental codas cannot end in voiced obstruents, [j], [h], [ʔ], and voiced plosives. The allowed clusters are mostly of the four types: [l/r] + obstruent or nasal; nasal + obstruent; obstruent + [t]; and plosive + fricative (Fox 2005: 59). Codas composed of three segments are common, especially due to the presence of inflectional endings (Russ 1994: 125). However, certain important restrictions on their combinatory freedom operate as well (Fox 2005: 59, Fagan 2009: 37). The most pervasive of them is the presence of *t* or *s* in the final position (Fox 2005: 59). Four-segment codas invariably have a sonorant as their first element, and [sth ] or [th s] as their third and fourth elements (Fagan 2009: 37–38). Their presence within a single morpheme is extremely rare – only two lexemes are attested (Fox 2005: 59, Fagan 2009: 3; see also Hall 1992: 121). Inversely, they tend to appear in multi-morphemic forms, e.g. in inflected nouns, adjectives, and verbs (Hall 1992: 121, Russ 1994: 125, Fagan 2009: 37–38, van Oostendorp 2019: 43– 44). Five-segment codas are highly problematic. There are only three inflectional forms that exhibit such combinations of sounds (Hall 1992: 121, Russ 1994: 125). For some scholars, these clusters are "not well formed" (Wiese 1996: 48) being indeed "unpronounceable for many Germans" (Fagan 2009: 51 referring to Hall 1992: 121). As was the case of onsets (see Section 3.11), codas generally conform to the sonority scale principle, a common exception being [ps] and [th s] (Wiese 1996: 260, Fox 2005: 60, Fagan 2009: 37).

Overall, complex codas (*CC*) are instantiated both in Wymysiöeryś and the two control systems. In all three languages, coda clusters exhibit similar length and variety. These degrees of complexity of Wymysiöeryś, Middle High German, and Modern Standard German are thus approximately equal: *CCW* ≈ *CCMHG* and *CCW* ≈ *CCMSG*.

#### **3.13 Module-global complexity**

The relational complexities of Wymysiöeryś, Middle High German, and Modern Standard German determined locally for the twelve phonetic/phonological fea-

tures are recapitulated in Table 1 below. For each feature studied, relational complexity was determined in terms of equality ≈ (similar), inequality ≤ / ≥ (minimally lower/greater), and strict inequality < / > (substantially lower/greater). The evidence shows that the complexity of Wymysiöeryś is substantially greater than the complexity exhibited by Middle High German and Modern Standard German with regard to the features of triphthongs, nasality, consonants, palatalization, and onset clusters. With regard to the feature of vocalic sonorants and consonantal length, the complexity of Wymysiöeryś is substantially lower than the complexities of Middle High German and Modern Standard German, respectively. Lastly, with regard to aspiration, the complexity of Wymysiöeryś is substantially lower than the complexity exhibited by Modern Standard German. In the remaining cases, the complexity of Wymysiöeryś is equal to the complexities of Middle High German and Modern Standard German.

Table 1: Local complexity of Wymysiöeryś in relation to Middle High German and Modern Standard German

When analyzed globally from the perspective of the entire sound-system module, Wymysiöeryś exhibits greater complexity than the two control systems. In comparison to Middle High German, Wymysiöeryś exhibits greater complexity in half of the features – in the other half, the complexity of the two languages is equal. In comparison to Modern Standard German, Wymysiöeryś also exhibits greater complexity in six features; in one feature, the complexity of Modern Standard German surpasses that of Wymysiöeryś; in the remaining five features, the

complexities of the two languages are equal. If one allocates 1 for being substantially greater (>), 0 for equality (≈), and -1 for being substantially lower (<), the relational global sound-system complexity values (*SS-COMPL*) are the following: Wymysiöeryś (+6) versus Middle High German (-6); and Wymysiöeryś (+5) and Modern Standard German (-4). Accordingly, *SS-COMPL*W > *SS-COMPL*MHG and *SS-COMPL*W > *SS-COMPL*MSG.

It is also possible to relate the complexities of the three languages simultaneously, and thus take into account complexity relationship linking Middle High German and Modern Standard German in addition to relationships involving Wymysiöeryś. The scale in Figure 1 below represents the relative position of the three languages. The scale is limited by two extremes: maximal score +24 (the complexity of language *x* is substantially greater than the complexity of languages *y* and *z* in all features) and minimal score -24 (the complexity of language *x* is substantially lower than the complexity of languages *y* and *z* in all features). Out of possible 24 points (12 for each comparative analysis with one of the other systems), Wymysiöeryś scores +11 (12 >; 11 ≈; 1 <). Middle High German scores -7 (1 >; 15 ≈; 8 <). Modern Standard German scores -4 (3 >; 14 ≈; 7 <). This again demonstrates the greater module-global complexity of Wymysiöeryś if compared to the two control languages.

Figure 1: Relative complexity of Wymysiöeryś, Middle High German and Modern Standard German

For some features (i.e. triphthongs, vocalic sonorants, nasal vowels, and consonantal length) the contrast between Wymysiöeryś, Middle High German, and Modern Standard German concerns the presence of a category (distinctiveness), not only the number of the category's expression manners (economy). That is, in one language (or two languages) a certain category is instantiated, while in the remaining one(s), it is not instantiated at all. In total, Wymysiöeryś instantiates eleven categories (only the category of aspiration is not expressed); Middle High German instantiates eight categories (the absent categories are triphthongs, vocalic sonorants, nasality, and most likely aspiration); Modern Standard German instantiates ten categories (the absent categories are triphthongs and consonantal length). If, for the instantiation of each category, a language is allocated 1

point, Wymysiöeryś scores 11, Middle High German 8, and Modern Standard German 10 – Wymysiöeryś being thus more complex than the control languages.

As explained in Section 2, the estimation of module-global complexity is always problematic due to the issue of commensuration and the availability of various manners of combining local complexities. Therefore, the converging results of the three complexity measurements of the sound-system module used in this section – which all identify Wymysiöeryś as the most complex among the analyzed languages – demonstrate that Wymysiöeryś' greater complexity score is not accidental or theory-driven. It is thus very likely that the sound system of Wymysiöeryś is *objectively* more complex than the two control languages.39

# **4 The origin of the surplus**

Having established that as far as the sound system is concerned, the global complexity of Wymysiöeryś is greater than the complexity of Middle High German and Modern Standard German, I will determine whether this complexity surplus exhibited by Wymysiöeryś is attributable to contact with Polish. First, the source of the complexity surplus found in seven features will be analyzed: triphthongs, vocalic sonorants, nasality, consonants, consonantal length, palatalization, and onset clusters (Section 4.1–Section 4.7). This will subsequently allow me to determine the surplus' origin from a global perspective (Section 4.8).

### **4.1 Triphthongs**

Currently, the vocalic system of Polish contains only short monophthongs.40 Inversely, syllables may not exhibit complex nuclei, and thus long vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs (Gussmann 2007: 181; see also Strutyński 1998: 59–60, 72, 74, Jassem 2003: 105–106, Sussex & Cubberley 2006: 154, 156, see however Wągiel 2016). At previous diachronic stages, specifically between the 10th and the 15th century, Polish did exhibit long vowels. Vocalic length was however lost in the 16th century (Długosz-Kurczabowa & Dubisz 2006: 132, 136–137). Although absent at a phonemic level, diphthongs emerge in Polish due to nasalization processes (Wągiel 2016: 53, 62–64, 83)41 and also exist in dialects (Dejna 1973, Bąk

39Since the absence of a category has more far-reaching systemic effects than the distinct numbers of encoding manners, one could arguably give even more weight to the complexity of those languages where a category is present. Since the complexity hierarchy of the three languages would remain the same, this would have no important bearings on the result of my study.

40These vowels are /i/, /ɨ/ɘ/, /u/, /e/, /a/, /o/. Often, [ɨ/ɘ ̟ ] and [i] are considered allophones of a ̟ single phoneme (Sussex & Cubberley 2006: 154, 156).

41Alternatively, the emergent nasal components are analyzed as approximants (Gussmann 2007).

1997). Sometimes, sequences composed of a vowel and the approximants [j] or [w] are analyzed as diphthongs (Jassem 1973, Demenko 1999, Wągiel 2016: 81–83). In any case, neither presently nor at its previous developmental stages, Polish possessed true triphthongs. As a result, the presence of triphthongs in Wymysiöeryś cannot result from contact with Polish.42

### **4.2 Vocalic sonorant**

Although Polish admits sequences with "trapped" sonorants, in which a sonorant is enclosed between two elements of lower sonority, typically two obstruents, e.g. [drg] *drgać* 'vibrate' (Kijak 2008: 62, 66), it fails to possess true syllabic sonorants. This contrasts with the situation attested in other (neighboring) Slavonic languages where sonorants used in the above-mentioned sequences tend to exhibit a syllabic status (Sussex & Cubberley 2006, Kijak 2008: 66, see the absence of syllabic sonorants in discussions of Polish phonetics and phonology, e.g. Strutyński 1998, Jassem 2003, Gussmann 2007, and Wągiel 2016). As a result, the presence of vocalic sonorants in Wymysiöeryś cannot be attributed to Polish influence.43

### **4.3 Nasality**

Nasality is a prominent feature of the Polish sound system. Polish has two nasal phonemes *ą* /ɔ/ and *ę* /ɛ/ (Urbańczyk 1991: 297–298, Rothstein et al. 1993: 659, Bloch-Rozmej 1997, Gussmann 2007, Wągiel 2016: 88, 100). In addition to those two phonemes, which are usually realized as [ɔ] and [ɛ], Polish contains a large number of nasal vowels at a phonetic level, e.g. [ĩ], [ã], [ũ], and [ɨ/ɘ] (Bloch- ̟ Rozmej 1997: 95, Strutyński 1998: 58–59, 61, 72). Overall, for every oral vowel, there is a nasal equivalent used in certain environments (Urbańczyk 1991: 298).44 As a result, nasality is viewed as a key phonological and phonetic category in Polish (Bąk 1997, Strutyński 1998: 77, Gussmann 2007: 269–287, Wągiel 2016).45

42One should note that, although absent in Modern Standard German (see Section 3.3), triphthongs are attested in the West Germanic family, e.g. in Bavarian German and High Alemannic varieties.

43On the other hand, syllabic sonorants are also relatively common in various varieties of (Modern Standard) German (see Section 3.4) and in other Germanic languages.

44Such environments are: /n/ + /fricative/ and /m/ + /f, v/ (Urbańczyk 1991: 298).

45In a careful Standard Polish speech, the realization of nasality is asynchronous (Urbańczyk 1991: 297–298, Bąk 1997). This gives rise to the emergence of nasal approximants such as [w̃], [ɰ], and [ȷ] (Rothstein et al. 1993: 660, Gussmann 2007: 270–271). In colloquial speech, nasal vowels often resolve into oral vowels and nasal consonants (Rothstein et al. 1993: 659, Bąk 1997, Rubach 1977, Rowicka & van de Weijer 1992, Bloch-Rozmej 1997: 84–86, Gussmann 2007: 271).

#### Alexander Andrason

Contrary to Polish, nasal vowels do not constitute a prominent feature in the phonetics and phonology of continental Germanic languages (see their absence in general works on the Germanic family, e.g. Harbert 2007 and Jacobs et al. 1994).46 In West Germanic and German varieties, nasal vowels are generally restricted to loanwords, often allowing for an alternative oral pronunciation (Russ 1994: 78, 108, Fagan 2009: 9, Caratini 2009: 51, 73–74). German dialects in which nasality is more prominent are: Swabian (an Upper German, Alemannic dialect), Pfaelzisch (*Pfälzisch*) or Palatine German (van Ness 1994: 423, Stevenson 1997: 71, Niebaum & Macha 1999: 197), and the dialect of Luzern (Bacher 1905: 179). Secondary nasal vowels are also found in Yiddish (Weinreich 2008: 583–585, Addendum 606, Herzog et al. 1992: 19–20, 41, Jacobs et al. 2005: 97–99) and Frisian (Hoekstra & Tierstna 1994: 508).47

Although nasality is present in the Germanic family, being a common phonetic process from a cross-linguistic perspective, its emergence in Wymysiöeryś most likely stems from Polish influence. Indeed, nasal vowels appear most commonly and most consistently in Polish loans. This complies with the origin of nasality in Yiddish where its presence is attributed to Slavonic influence (Weinreich 2008: 583–585).48

#### **4.4 Consonants**

Polish has a large and diversified set of consonants. The basic consonantal inventory consists of 41 sounds: 38 consonants and 3 approximants [j, w, wj ] (Bąk 1997, Strutyński 1998: 74, Jassem 2003, Gussmann 2007: 3–8). This set is often expanded to nearly fifty due to the inclusion of voiceless sonorants [m̥, n̥, l, r̥ ̥] and a voiced velar [ɣ] (Gussmann 2007: 4). With the incorporation of palatalized consonants and the approximant [ɰ], the maximal system ascends to nearly seventy consonants (Strutyński 1998: 54, 72–73). Crucially, the consonants that are absent in Middle High German and Modern German but that currently feature in Wymysiöeryś are all found in Polish too. This includes: (a) laminal alveolopalatal ([ɕ], [ʑ], [tɕ], and [dʑ]) and postalveolar sibilants and affricates ([s], [z ̠ ],̠ [ṯs], [ḏz ̠ ]) (Hamann 2003, 2004; cf. Karaś & Madejowa 1977 and Gussmann 2007: ̠

46The exception is a chapter dedicated to Old Icelandic (Þráinsson 1994: 147).

47Nasality is more consistently present in peripheral languages: Surinam Dutch (DeSchutter 1994: 444), Afrikaans (Donaldson 1994: 481), and – albeit rather as an archaism used by older speakers – Pennsylvania German (van Ness 1994: 423).

48Note also that continental German varieties where nasality is more visible (e.g. Pfaelzisch/Palatine and Luzern) are usually spoken in areas adjacent to languages containing prominent nasal vowels, in particular French.

75–78);49 (b) alveolo-palatal nasal [ȵ] (Jassem 2003: 104, alternatively transcribed as a palatal [ɲ]); (c) a series of other palatal(ized) consonants (see Section 4.7, Rothstein et al. 1993: 687–690, Strutyński 1998: 38, 42–44, 54, Sussex & Cubberley 2006: 165–166, Gussmann 2007: 4–7); and (d) the labialized velar approximant [w] (Jassem 2003, Strutyński 1998, Gussmann 2007).

With regard to soft and hard sibilants and affricates, contact with Polish seems to be the direct and sole factor responsible for their introduction to Wymysiöeryś (Żak 2016, Andrason 2014b,a, 2015, 2021). This can be inferred from the absence of those two series in West Germanic languages, on the one hand, and their particular stability in Wymysiöeryś in lexical borrowings from Polish, on the other hand.50 For the remaining types of consonantal surplus, Polish seems to have (significantly) strengthened and/or accelerated tendencies that are typologically common and that had operated (at least marginally) language- or family-internally.

Although the presence of the alveolo-palatal nasal [ȵ] may partially be attributed to the Polish influence, being evident in a large number of Polish loanwords, in which the original sound [ȵ] is rendered as such, it seems to coincide with language-internal processes. In genuine Wymysiöeryś vocabulary, [ȵ] typically derived from *ŋ́* [ŋj ] (itself a reflex of an original cluster *ng*/*nc* [ŋ]) or arose in cases where *n* was followed by palatal sounds *i*, *j*, or *ć* (Andrason 2021). The palatalization of the velar nasal [ŋ] to [ŋj ] constitutes a recurrent cross-linguistic tendency. It occurred in the Szynwałd/Bojków (Schönwald) dialect, closely related to Wymysiöeryś, which suggests a dialectal – family-internal – development (cf. Gusinde 1911: 98–99). Even though articulatory proximity may motivate the development from [ŋj ] to [ȵ], this change occurred only after World War II, coinciding with the increased presence of the Polish language in Wilamowice (see that it was still written *ŋ́* by Kleczkowski 1920 and Mojmir 1930–1936). The palatalization of *n* in palatal contexts, which had already taken place before