Deconstructing glottalization, ejectivity, and breathy voice in Armenian dialects

Previous work has reported that several Armenian varieties show ejective or glottalized stops, a claim with significant implications for the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop system. This paper reviews the historical, dialectological, and phonetic evidence for ejective, glottalized, and breathy-voiced stops in Armenian, finding that these claims largely rest on unreliable impressionistic reports. To provide an empirical assessment, we present preliminary acoustic data from field recordings of three native speakers of the Janik subdialect of Hamshen Armenian. This variety has previously been reported to possess glottalized / ejective stops, and we additionally test whether its historical voiced series is realized with breathy phonation. We conducted an exploratory acoustic analysis by extracting fundamental frequency (F0) trajectories and Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) values at the vowel onset following target plosives. Our initial findings yield no clear evidence of full glottal closure or severe aperiodicity associated with glottalization or ejectivity, nor of the laryngeal slackness associated with breathy voice. Instead, the target tokens predominantly exhibit high-falling F0 trajectories and CPP values characteristic of modal voice. While further large-scale articulatory and statistical work is needed, these preliminary results suggest that where non-modal phonation or ejectivity does occur in Armenian, it is likely sporadic or paralinguistic, offering little support for the existence of a stable ejective, glottalized, or breathy-voiced series.