Schedule 76. StuTS

There is evidence that Afrikaans is undergoing tonogenesis, whereby the difference in voice onset time (VOT) between voiced and voiceless plosives is getting smaller while the difference in fundamental frequency (f0) between the vowels following those plosives is getting larger. In this talk I introduce the concept of agent-based modelling as a way to simulate sound change and test hypotheses about it. Exemplar theory, which attendants of the talk do not need to be familiar with, serves as a model of how phonemic information is encoded. By demonstrating an agent-based model that two fellow students and me implemented in Python, I will show how sound change can be simulated in a surprisingly simple way.