New Book Published by Mohamed Afkir and Georgia Zellou

Last month, one of our graduate students, Mohamed Afkir, along with his advisor Georgia Zellou, published a new book on the phonetics of Mohamed's native language: Tarifit. Officially titled "The Phonetics of Tarifit: Variation and Change in a Moroccan Amazigh Language," this book is a comprehensive overview of a language that has historically lacked significant research on its inherent phonetics. 

Tarifit is an Amazigh language spoken in northern Morocco. This compact book provides an overview of some aspects of the phonetics of this under-studied language, focusing on patterns of variation and ongoing sound changes. An acoustic analysis of productions by native speakers is provided, comparing clear and fast speaking styles, focusing on the phonetic realization of vowels in Tarifit: three full vowels /a, i, and u/, and variation in the realization of schwa. The analysis reveals phonetically vowelless words in Tarifit: vowelless productions are a rare, but allowable variant of some words (especially those containing multiple voiceless obstruents). Another ongoing sound change is explored: post-vocalic /r/ deletion. They found higher rates of r-dropping by female speakers. A perception study investigating native speakers' discrimination of words is also presented. This publication discusses what the findings have for models of phonetic variation, individual differences in language production, and sound change theory.