Re: Caste Languages

> Unless we have remarkably similar dreams, I believe that
> there is such a language. It is called Chukchi, and is spoken
> in Eastern Siberia. It was one of the many languages that
> appeared in a book that I borrowed in a library some 3 or 4
> years ago, which consisted of samples and descriptions of
> some of the world's languages. It said that the consonant
> that was represented as "k" in writing, was pronounced "k" by
> men, and "ts" by women. The consonant cluster "rk" was
> pronounced "rk" by men, and "tsts" by women. The book gave no
> phonetic transcription more precise than this.
>
> I can't begin to fathom which phonological processes that lie
> behind such different realizations of the same phoneme. But
> there you have it. Unfortunately, I can't recall the title
> and author of the book exactly, but it's quite possible that
> it was Kenneth Katzner's "The languages of the world" that I read.
Apparently there's an article in the journal Anthropological Linguistics
about Chukchi; the abstract mentions the idea that the different
realizations had their origins in a neighboring dialect, whose accent
the women picked up as a social marker.

The URL of the relevant issue's contents:
http://www.indiana.edu/~anthling/v42-3.html

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Shreyas Sampat