Prosodic and intonational patterns in Mirandese
An instrumental analysis of a minority language in Portugal
Abstract
This study examines the phonological and intonational patterns of Mirandese, a minority Astur-Leonese language spoken in northeastern Portugal. Despite increasing research interest, intonation in Mirandese remains understudied. Drawing on the Autosegmental-Metrical framework and using ToBI-based annotation, this research presents an instrumental phonetic analysis of intonation contours across sentence types in two Mirandese varieties (central and frontier). Data were collected through a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and analysed acoustically with Praat. The results reveal both convergent and divergent prosodic strategies between the varieties, with specific nuclear contours employed to distinguish focus types, question modalities, and pragmatic meanings. Mirandese aligns with broader Romance intonational patterns but also exhibits unique configurations influenced by language contact and internal variation. These findings contribute to the typology of Romance intonation and underscore the importance of documenting endangered linguistic systems.
Keywords
Mirandese, minority languages, intonation, phonologyReferences
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