Whereas it is difficult to quantify the former of these impacts the nature of a phonological change, whether slight or radical, the latter impact the number of words affected by a phonological change
can be calculated. Such an analysis is undertaken in the following section.
3.4.4 Aggregate phonological changes
Phonological changes cause words to take on different shapes and sounds. If two dialects do not share a given phonological change, then they will have differing forms for those words that have a common
source. However, two dialects could have several phonological changes that are not shared between them and yet these changes might affect only a very small total number of words. On the other hand,
two dialects could have just one phonological change that is not shared between them, yet that one change may affect a large percentage of words.
Based on the assumption that the greater total number of words impacted by phonological changes not shared between two dialects causes a greater degree of distinction between them, it is insightful to
look at the relative number of words affected by given phonological changes. Note that two dialects may have both undergone several phonological changes that affected a large percentage of the words;
however, if both dialects share all of the same phonological changes, then presumably they still have exactly the same form for each word they still have in common. Obviously, this is not relevant for
lexical innovations, wherein the two dialects would by definition no longer have the same word. One way to analyze the impact of nonshared phonological changes is to examine the average total
number of words affected by phonological changes. Table 8 summarizes of the phonological changes plus the average number of occurrences per 100 words.
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Table 8. Percentage of words affected by each phonological change
Phonological change Average per 100 words
a Preploded nasal voiceless plosive 18.0
b Glottal stop lost after long vowels 13.3
c oo əə , ɨɨ 13.0
d ɑɑ ɒɒ 10.5
e ee ɨɨ 5.5
f ɤɤ ʉʉ , oo
5.5 g u o
4.0 h Final palatal consonant shifted
3.8 i
iə ii , ee , ɛɛ 3.5
j oo wɑɑ
2.8 k oo after N uu , ɔɔ
2.5 l
ɛɛ, ie yɑɑ 1.8
The letters associated with the phonological changes are the same as in the previous section. Note that the list of phonological changes has been arranged in order of changes that affected the most words,
on average, per 100 words in this study. The phonological change that affected the most words is placed at the top of the list. These percentages can then be applied to the map of geographic distribution
Figure 5 to produce the contour map in Figure 6.
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This average is based on counts of words within the wordlist and not on a frequency count of any particular text.
Figure 6. Contour map of average total number of phonological changes. The ten dialect regions can now be compared to each other. A dialect region here is defined as a set
of dialects that have no phonological change boundaries between them. If two dialects lie within the same set of circles, such as Pos Buntu and Betau R and S, respectively, then there are no consistent
phonological changes between the two dialects. If two dialect regions have just one line between them, the value associated with that contour line
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is the average number of instances per 100 words of differences in the two regions as a result of one or more phonological changes. In the case of Sungkai Q
and Bidor N, for example, the line dividing them has the value of four; hence, there are approximately four instances per 100 words where there are differences in the two dialects as a result of an identified
phonological change. This analysis can be extended to dialects that are separated by more than one contour line. In
principle the procedure is to add up the figures for the contour lines that are crossed. In practice this can be a little tricky since the contour map in Figure 6 is actually a simplification of what amounts to a
multidimensional surface. If a line is drawn to avoid unnecessary crossing of contour lines, however, the correct average aggregate number of phonological changes can be determined. For example, when
comparing Cluny H with Lanai Y, a line can be drawn from H to Y that avoids going through the two southeast regions so that only two contour lines are crossed. The sum of these two lines is 30, meaning
that on average there are 30 instances per 100 words where there are differences between Cluny and Serau as a result of phonological changes.
Every dialect region was compared to each of the others. The following matrix shows a summary of the average aggregate number of instances of differences per 100 words, comparing each dialect region
to all the others.
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A given contour line may well represent more than one phonological change. For instance, in the northeast region dialects AA, Y, and Z are encircled by a contour line with the value 22. This actually represents the sum of three
phonological changes: ‘c, f, i.’ These three changes have occurred in these three languages, but not outside of that area.
Table 9. Average aggregate number of instances of differences per 100 words
Q,C– Sungkai, Rasau 3.5 L,N,T,BB,EE– Batu 17, Bidor, Simoi Baru, Cenan Cerah, Pagar
2.5 6.0 G,O– Tangkai Cermin, Bota 9.0 5.5 11.5 J– Tapah
