Professor Marija Tabain FAHA is one of the world’s leading scholars in linguistic phonetics. She has made an outstanding contribution to the quantitative analysis of the phonetics and phonology, particularly within central Australian languages.
Marija’s work has advanced our understanding of how research on “small languages” can elucidate the acoustic and articulatory constraints that underpin and shape speech sound inventories and models of phonological universals. She joins us to talk about her work following her election to the Academy of the Humanities Fellowship in 2024.
What inspired you to pursue your field of study?
At school I was good at maths and science, and even though I enjoyed physics, my real passion was for languages and music. At university I eventually fell into linguistics, which included phonetics. Phonetics brought all my passions together – sound, language and science. Everything just made sense to me. To this day, even though the bulk of my work involves scientific techniques, I still use my ears to evaluate speech sounds in different languages of the world – either to verify the acoustic analysis of a language I am newly exploring; or in my role as a classroom teacher; or as Editor of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, where authors present audio recordings alongside their phonetic analyses. Those strict aural training classes in my music degree have been very much appreciated!
How does your research address the challenges we’re facing as a society?
The old joke goes “A trilingual speaks three languages; a bilingual speaks two languages; and a monolingual speaks English”. In our Anglo-centricworld, we often forget that most people on our planet manage more than one language in their day-to-day life. And language is a crucial part of a person’s identity – it matters to people. I’ve always hoped that my work makes “little” languages feel seen, giving them the same status and prestige as would be afforded the major world languages.
Why are the humanities important?
What I always liked about grammar was that although the formal rules can account for the bulk of the data, there are always exceptions, and those exceptions are frequent. I guess that that imperfection always appealed to me – trying to find order in the exceptions. We don’t have exceptions in the physical world – exceptions are essentially human, and language is very human.
What excites you in your field right now?
First of all, I think all phoneticians would say that it is important to study as many languages as possible. It is only by examining the speech sounds of an increasingly large number and variety of languages that we can come to a better understanding of the capacities of human speech. At the moment, our knowledge is still very much buttressed by the major world languages, and this has consequences for things like speech therapy and speech technology. But thankfully, the advances in communication and increased travel possibilities in recent decades have made the collection of speech data from a wider variety of languages more tractable, and this has already led to important advances in phonetics.
That said, I think two of the most exciting areas of research in phonetics are in prosody, and in sound change. Prosody is the rhythm and melody of speech – it is what is left when the consonants and vowels are stripped away (for instance, when you hum a sentence instead of saying it). Prosody is crucial to structuring information in discourse; in helping listeners find word boundaries in running speech (including infants learning speech); in assisting our “inner voice” as we read written texts; in maintaining conversational flow etc. Yet it is an area of phonetics that is considered “difficult” by many phoneticians. I think what is exciting is that as we investigate the prosody of more and more languages of the world, we see that the variety in prosody is far greater than we had predicted. No wonder that it is usually the most difficult thing for a learner of a foreign language to master, even if their consonants and vowels are perfect!
The other exciting area of research right now is in sound change. Historical linguists have for centuries used sound change to work out relationships within and between language families. But the advances in instrumental phonetic techniques since World War II means that we are now able to look at the detailed mechanics of how sound change happens, as it’s happening. One of the special challenges is with the random/chaotic nature of sound change – for instance, English used to pronounce the /k/ in “knee” during Shakespeare’s time, but not any more. Yet its sibling language German continues to pronounce “kn” with a /k/. Why is that the case?
Australian and New Zealand English are indistinguishable to most speakers of other English dialects, yet to Australian ears, New Zealand English pronounces “pat” as “pet” and “pet” as “pit” – why did this happen in New Zealand and not in Australia?
So I think these are some difficult questions that phonetics is just starting to answer, and it seems to involve a complex array of factors, including speech perception, cognition and social factors.
Can you tell us about your current project / research?
I have three main projects on the go. One is a study of Mian, a language of Papua New Guinea. As part of a dictionary project of that language, we are examining the consonants and vowels, as well as the prosody. Mian has a somewhat unusual prosodic system which includes five “lexical pitch accents”. Teasing that out will be interesting. This project is part of my career-long work supporting smaller languages from all over the world.
The second main project is on the European language Croatian. After so many years of working on languages from all over the world, it’s been a career dream-come-true to be able to work on the first language I ever spoke. In this project, we are examining different dialects to determine how changes in prosody might be effected. In Slavic studies, the standard dialects of Croatian are famous for a retraction of stress that created a lexical pitch accent system – basically, it means that whereas in most European languages my name is pronounced “marija”, with stress on the second syllable, in Croatian it is pronounced “marija”, with stress on the first syllable. When this happened, it created a mini tone system, contrasting rising and falling pitch accents. By comparing dialects that are at different stages of the retraction, we can see what acoustic cues are involved at different steps of the change – pitch, duration, or loudness. Most recently we have been working on the Vela Luka dialect, my father’s dialect spoken on the island of Korčula in the Adriatic. It is a conservative (meaning historically unchanged) dialect that exists side-by-side with the standard language. It’s been really nice to be able to do that work, from a personal point of view.
Finally, we’re hoping to start using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to look at speech in smaller languages, including Aboriginal languages such as Arrernte. I’ve worked on articulatory phonetics on and off ever since my PhD, especially on the articulatory phonetics of Arrernte. Intellectually, the most exciting thing is when I can marry the articulation with the acoustics, because that is really challenging. MRI gives us the most comprehensive information on speech articulation possible (compared to other techniques such as ultrasound or palatography), and having those images will provide us with information that we’ve only been able to guess at. We were at the pilot stage for the MRI research when the pandemic hit, so the project stalled. But I haven’t given up hope yet!
