The Perceptual Origin of Added Glottals in Spanish Loans in Modern Nahuan

Abstract

Spanish vowel-final loans are consistently adopted in modern Nahuan languages with an added glottal phoneme: Spanish mesa > Nahuan mesah ‘table’. This adaptation is puzzling because there is no obvious aspect of the phonological or morphological grammar of Nahuan that motivates it. We present evidence that, due to the weakened voicing of Spanish utterance-final vowels, Nahuan speakers perceive Spanish vowel-final words in utterance-final position as ending in the Nahuan glottal phoneme and adopt the word with it. Our proposal bears on the growing body of literature showing that first- and second-language learners are more sensitive to the phonetic characteristics of sounds when they occur in utterance-final position, likely because of their increased length or the fact that they are not masked by following sounds. Consequently, we suggest that the position of source forms within the utterance can affect loanword adaptation.