PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper presents a first phonetic analysis of voiced, devoiced and ejectivized stop sounds in Setswana taken from two differ- ent speech databases. It is observed that rules governing the voicing/devoicing processes depend on sociophonetic and eth- nolinguistic factors. Speakers, especially women, from the rural North West area of South Africa tend to preserve the phonolog- ically stronger devoiced (or even ejectivized) forms, both in sin- gle standing plosives as well as in the post-nasal context (NC ˚). On the other hand, in the more industrialized area of Gauteng, voiced forms of plosives prevail. The empirically observed data is modelled with KaMoso, a computational multi-agent simula- tion framework. So far, this framework focused on open social structures (whole world networks) that facilitate language mod- ernization through exchange between different phonetic forms. The updated model has been enriched with social/phonetic sim- ulation scenarios in which speech agents interact between each other in a so-called parochial setting, reflecting smaller, closed communities. Both configurations correspond to the socio- political changes that have been taking place in South Africa over the last decades, showing the differences in speech be- tween women and men from rural and industrialized areas of the country.