A phonetic case study of Tŝilhqot’in /z/ and /zʕ/

This paper provides an acoustic description of /z/ and /zʕ/ in Tŝilhqot’in (Northern Dene). These sounds are noted by Cook (1993, 2013) to show lenition and some degree of laterality in coda position. Based on recordings made in 2014 with a single, mother-tongue speaker of Tŝilhqot’in, we describe their acoustic properties and examine their distribution as a function of prosodic position and segmental environment. We find that they vary along three dimensions: manner (fricative–approximant), degree of retraction (non-retracted–retracted), and laterality (non-lateral–lateral). In addition, some tokens have a characteristic ‘buzziness’, which has been associated with the Chinese front apical vowel (Shao & Ridouane 2018, 2019) and the Swedish ‘Viby-i’ (Westberger 2019). We argue that ‘lenition’ (Kirchner 2004, Ennever, Meakins & Round 2017) can only account for some of the observed variation and suggest that both /z/ and /zʕ/ are specified for two tongue articulations: tongue tip/blade and tongue body (Laver 1994), encompassing laterality (and concomitant retraction) in addition to the primary coronal gesture.