Ongoing vowel shortening in vanishing Soikkola Ingrian: challenges for description, codification, and typology

The vanishing Soikkola dialect of Ingrian (Finnic; Uralic) manifests an ongoing shortening of second syllable unstressed long vowels (V2) in trisyllables. Our major acoustic study [1] showed that the original phonological contrast of long and short V2 is currently in a state of fine-grained continuum from contrast maintenance to complete merger, depending on the structure. Structural variation is aggravated by considerable interspeaker variability, addresed in this paper. Out of the five studied speakers, three were innovative and two conservative as regards long V2 shortening. Speakers do not communicate in the language any longer, which affects the natural curve of sound changes. Moreover, this particular sound change is likely never to be completed due to imminent language loss. Unfinished long V2 shortening with its high interspeaker variability creates challenges for the development of practical transcription, needed for language description, codification, and teaching, and for the typological placement of the rare ternary quantity contrast of consonants attested in Soikkola Ingrian.