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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 224
cent or more. Thus these figures should be taken as no more than a guide to
whether a language is likely to be extremely stable or very threatened.
Writing system
Very often the writing system used for a particular language is more a matter
of the colonial power than anything linguistic, and in many cases writing
systems change either from country to country or as the colonial powers change
or for religious reasons. A blank here often means that the language is not
written a great deal at all, but may well be a matter of the information not
having been readily available.
Stress
In many languages, particularly in tone languages, stress is not a relevant
concept, and often this section is correspondingly left blank for that reason.
Where stress falls in a relatively regular position in the word, this is noted.
Where the position of stress is known to be dependent on vowel length or syllable
weight this is also noted. In such cases it is not usually stated whether
stress falls on a heavy/long syllable near the beginning or near the end of the
word.
Rare consonants
Consonants which were included as rare types were retroflex, uvular and pharyngeal
consonants and clicks, ejectives and implosives. Any consonant type
not having an IPA symbol was noted. No distinction is made between a language
which has a single retroflex consonant (for example) and one which has
a whole series of retroflex consonants.
Number of vowels
The number of vowels a language has is, of course, a matter of analysis rather
than something which is an automatic given. Where there were five vowel
qualities but ten contrastive vowel elements because the second five were
distinguished by length or nasalisation, this is noted as ‘5 + length’ or ‘5 +
nasalisation’ rather than as ‘10’. Where the long or nasalised vowels are not
as numerous as the basic vowel qualities, the number is provided in parentheses.
Diphthongs are noted separately. It should be noted that it is frequently
difficult to tell from descriptions whether a diphthong or a vowel
sequence is intended, and usually the terminology of the source has been
respected.