Department of Linguistics

This is a report of a pilot study of the phonetic variation of vowels due to stress and syllable type in Pima, a dialect of O’odham. O’odham, along with several other Uto-Aztecan languages, has a five vowel system which appears unevenly distributed in two ways: its only front vowel is high, and it includes three high-back or high-mid vowels. This arrangement of canonical vowels appears not to reflect the influence of a drive for maximal dispersion of canonical vowels, something which has been argued to account for the frequency and type of vowel inventories cross-linguistically. Several properties of the allophonic variation observed in Pima, however, can be explained by appealing to just such a drive to maximize acoustic distinctness. Factors besides maximal distinctness must also be involved in controlling this distribution, however, as evidenced by the relative stability of this vowel system among Uto-Aztecan languages.