Nasalization in Enggano Historical Phonology

Abstract:Enggano, spoken on an island of the same name off the southern coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, has long puzzled historical linguists. Its high rate of lexical replacement and sometimes-obscure reflexes of reconstructed Proto-Malayo-Polynesian vocabulary have led many to question its status as an Austronesian language. Recent work on Enggano historical phonology and subgrouping has formed a strong argument for its inclusion in Malayo-Polynesian, but certain aspects of its historical phonology remain a mystery. This paper is concerned with word-level nasality, an innovation in Enggano that remains unexplained and has been described as an unconditioned split. The paper begins with the hypothesis that word-level nasality in Enggano spread from sonorant codas that first merged as nasals, then deleted. The only major condition on this change is that sonorant codas in syllables with a schwa nucleus did not trigger nasalization. Finally, the paper investigates several cases where, because of the large number of mergers in Enggano, the modern Enggano words cannot be unambiguously assigned to only one of multiple possible reconstructed words. The result is a hypothesis that can accurately explain the majority of cases of word-level nasality in Enggano, but with four exceptions where nasality is present with no apparent historical trigger. These four exceptions prevent a confident defense of the present hypothesis but may hold clues to Enggano's turbulent recent history and irregular intergenerational transmission due to a dramatic loss in the Enggano population.