Pangasinan

Last Updated: 2020-06-18

SLIGHTLY COMPROMISED: possible conflation between /ŋ/ and /nɡ/

Background

Language Family: Austronesian / Malayo-Polynesian / Western Malayo-Polynesian / Northern Philippine / Northern Luzon / South-Central Cordilleran / Southern Cordilleran / Pangasinic

• Pangasinan is spoken in the Philippines.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Bilabial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t̪ d̪				k ɡ
Affricates				tʃ
Nasals	m	n̪				ŋ
Fricatives			s				h
Trills		r̪
Approximants		l̪			j	w
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	ɛ		ɔ
Low		a

Alphabet

• Stress is sometimes marked with an acute accent (´) over a vowel (Benton 1971, 7).
• Some graphemes appearing in Spanish loanwords are often realized as they would be in Spanish. For example, ⟨f⟩ may be realized as [f] instead of [p] (Benton 1971, 10).
• There is some ambiguity as to whether ⟨ng⟩ represents phoneme /ŋ/ or sequence /nɡ/. I will default to /ŋ/.

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/a/
b	/b/
c	/k/; /s/	/s/: preceding front vowels; /k/: preceding back vowels
d	/d̪/
e	/ɛ/
f	/p/	appears in Spanish loanwords
g	/ɡ/
h	/h/
i	/i/
j	/h/	appears in Spanish loanwords
k	/k/
l	/l̪/
m	/m/
n	/n̪/
o	/ɔ/
p	/p/
q	/k/
r	/r̪/
s	/s/
t	/t̪/
u	/u/
v	/b/	appears in Spanish loanwords
w	/w/
y	/j/
z	/s/	appears in Spanish loanwords
Digraph
ch	/tʃ/
ng	/ŋ/	also written ⟨ñg⟩ to distinguish /ŋ/ from /nɡ/ - however, this is not present in the Crúbadán corpus
qu	/k/

Lenition Rules

• /d/ may be realized intervocalically as a flap (Benton 1971, 16); /d/ and [ɾ] vary freely word-finally.
• /t/ and /k/ may be neutralized to [ʔ] syllable-finally, preceding a consonant (Benton 1971, 17–18).
• /k/ may be realized as a fricative intervocalically (Benton 1971, 18–19).

Misc. Rules

• Nasals assimilate in place to the following consonant (Benton 1971, 21).
• /l/ may be realized as [d] word-finally (Benton 1971, 17).
• A non-phonemic glottal stop is epenthesized word-initially and can be epenthesized intervocalically (Benton 1971, 13).

References

Benton, Richard A. 1971. “Phonology.” In Pangasinan Reference Grammar, 1–37. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv9hvs53.5.