Our speaker will be Emma Wrenn. Her presentation, “The Sound System of Santiago Azajo P’urhepecha”, will also be her undergraduate honors thesis defense
Abstract
This is an account of the phonetic structures of Santiago Azajo P’urhepecha, a dialect of the P’urhepecha language. P’urhepecha is an isolate language spoken in Michoacán, Mexico, by about 138,000 people. P’urhepecha’s phonology has not been studied in as much detail as its syntax and morphology have, despite phonology’s importance to the study of morphosyntax. This thesis uses new acoustic measurements to describe the phonetics and phonology of one dialect of P’urhepecha and examine previous descriptions’ accuracy for the Santiago Azajo dialect.