Data sets for MA dissertation "A preliminary study on Sylheti tone production by second-generation British heritage speakers", Rosemary Vowles Gardiner 2026

Dissertation abstract This study looked at the tonal phonologies of adult first- and secondgeneration heritage speakers of Sylheti, a tonal Indo-Aryan language, inthe United Kingdom. According to anecdotal reports of older speakers inLondon, younger speakers are “not using tone.’’ The current work seeks totest this empirically, as well as assessing lexical tone as a feature specificallyvulnerable to attrition, particularly in a language where tone does not havea high functional load.Four second-generation and one first-generation British Sylheti speakers took part in a tone production experiment to elicit segmentally homophonous target word pairs that were expected to only differ by tone.Fundamental frequency plots across the rime of target word were used toassess the presence and qualities of contrastive lexical tones in the phonologies of these speakers.Second-generation heritage speakers exhibit radically reduced tonal inventories, with half the participants totally lacking consistent tonal distinctions, and divergence in tone’s realisation from homeland norms seen evenfor speakers that did show lexical tone. These innovations correlate withlexical attrition and other markers of phonological attrition, demarcatingit as the process responsible for the loss of contrastive tone in heritagelanguage speech.