Whither Uvulars

Now that I got to checking up on Oceanic Linguistics, their early release articles seem to have an interesting one by Blevins currently: “Uvular Reflexes of Proto-Austronesian *q: Mysterious Disappearance or Drift Toward Oblivion?” wherein she points out that Proto-Austronesian *q is much more unstable than should be expected.

Differing regular reflexes like *q > k or *q > ʔ establish that this must have remained as its own segment as late as until Proto-Oceanic and various other great-grand-daughter groups. Yet, out of a four-digit number of descendants, there are no more than two languages outside of Taiwan that have a /q/ that seems to come from *q (even one of them, upon reanalysis, apparently instead first merging *k and *q and then backing this *k to /q/ in various environments). Worldwide, uvulars are not all that rare, found in about 20% of languages. So Austronesian is off from the world average here by a factor of 100!

After rejecting a few other hypotheses involving e.g. functional load or language contact effects, Blevins settles on a hypothesis of conditional in/stability of uvulars, which sounds believable to me:

A more relevant structural factor that appears to be strongly correlated with /q/ versus /k/ contrasts is the size and shape of the vowel system. In language families like Semitic, Quechuan, and Eskimo–Aleut (aka Inuit–Yupik- Unangan), where uvular versus velar stop contrasts are reconstructable to the proto-language, and continued robustly, reconstructed vowel systems are small, and are also continued in most daughter languages (…) One possible explanation for the association between small peripheral vowel systems and velar versus uvular stop contrasts relates to perceptual cues of uvulars on adjacent vowels: uvulars are often described with significant “lowering” and “backing” effects on neighboring vowels, so that /i/ might be heard as [e], or /u/ as [o] before a uvular (…) in five vowel systems like /i u e o a/, lowering effects of uvulars would be less salient, or could be mistaken for intrinsic vowel properties.

This checks out also within Austronesian:

The PAN vowel system, as we have seen, was one with three peripheral vowels *i, *u, *a, and one central vowel, *ə. Interestingly, the Formosan languages that show uvular reflexes of *q are precisely those that have either retained the PAN four-vowel system or reduced it further to a three-vowel system with /i u a/.

[B]y PCEMP the vowel system had expanded to *i, *u, *e, *o, *a, *ə (with five peripheral vowels), later reduced to *i, *u, *e, *o, *a in Proto-South Halmahera–West New Guinea and POC (Blust 1993:247). If the *q versus *k contrast was dependent on pho- netic cues that were best realized in a vowel system with /i, u, a, (ə)/, then the expansion of the PCEMP vowel system might be seen as an important structural factor determining a drift away from /q/ in all descendant languages.

I can add that the languages I know with uvulars + large vowel systems (Siberian Uralic and various adjacent Turkic) seem to keep tight reins on the co-occurrence of uvulars and different vowels, often maintaining [q] as a mere “syllable harmonic” allophone of /k/ before back vowels. The case of Northern Khanty and Northern Mansi is also interesting, with a major vowel system collapse leading to a well-loaded /k/ : /χ/ (< *q) contrast. We find generally smallish vowel inventories plus robust uvular inventories also in e.g. NW Caucasian and more northern parts of Na-Dene; also Proto-Indo-European if the “plain velars” were treated as uvulars. Kartvelian might count as an example of sorts of this instability of uvulars, showing vowel systems with 5 or more members + original *q merging with /x/ in 3 languages out of 4. (/qʼ/ remains stable though; and it is also noted by Blevins that languages that have uvulars are also more likely to have ejectives.)

Counterexamples do still exist. NE Caucasian, at least, is a decently large family with sometimes quite large vowel systems and universally maintaining a large stock of uvulars. Cushitic languages also tend to have at least all of basic /a e i o u/ even when having uvulars (be they Awngi or Iraqw or Somali). But then most do not have them, and we could also consider /q/ rather than /kʼ/ being recent rub-off from Arabic in many of them.

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There is one possible hypothesis that seems to me to have escaped consideration, though: intermediate development? Perhaps, in some major intermediate languages like Proto-Oceanic, *q had changed to a reflex that was no longer a uvular stop but also not yet any of the most common reflexes — for example, an epiglottal stop *ʡ (attested as a reflex of *q in Amis) or a voiceless uvular fricative *χ, that probably should be expected to often decay to various glottal consonants or zero, but maybe could be still also sometimes re-fronted to reflexes like a velar stop /k/ or a velar fricative /ɣ/. Are there any areal tendencies in the frequency of velar (fronted) versus glottal etc. (backed) reflexes of *q across Austronesian? If yes, that might be a point in favor of this explanation.