Early Modern Greek /b d g/: Evidence from Rebetika and Folk Songs

In Arvaniti and Joseph (2000) we studied the variability in the pronunciation of the Greek phones spelled μπ, ντ, γγ/γχ, which in speech are said to consist of a nasal consonant, e.g., m, and a "voiced" stop consonant, e.g., b. Our data showed that the presence of the nasal depended largely on age, with younger speakers producing many more nasalless instances of these phones than older speakers. Here we examine the pronunciation of μπ, ντ, γγ/γχ in original recordings of early twentieth-century Greek rebétika and folk songs to see if these show similar variation, as linguistic theory would predict, or not (as traditional studies of Greek dialectology suggest). Our new data show variation in the pronunciation of these phones in a period for which no variation had been reported before. This early twentieth-century variation confirms our earlier conclusion that variation at the end of the twentieth century betokens a change to a new nasalless pronunciation, away from a previously stable variation pattern.