Glottal stop and glottalization in Lai (connected speech)

Abstract

In this paper, I focus primarily on glottal stop and glottalization in connected speech in Lai, a Tibeto-Burman (Kuki-Chin-Naga) language spoken in the northwest region of Burma. After some general remarks on glottal stop and glottalization in the world's languages, I list the phonemes of Lai, and proceed to discuss several topics of interest in connection with the phonetics and morphophonemics of glottalization in this language. These include the influence of glottalization on adjacent vowels, and its relationship to vowel length, creaky voice, and sonorant length, as well as certain grammatical functions it has acquired. I also provide spectrograms showing how glottalization is configured in Lai connected speech.