Labial-velar stops in Sakata (Bantu C34): Preliminary phonetic and phonological observations

This article is a preliminary phonetic and historical-phonological study of newly collected fieldwork data on labial-velar consonants in a poorly known cluster of closely related Bantu language varieties, known as Sakata (Bantu C34), from the Lower Kasai region in the Mai-Ndombe province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Labial-velar consonants (such as those transcribes as <kp> and <gb> in the International Phonetic Alphabet) are doubly articulated sounds produced with simultaneous occlusions at the lips and at the velum. Given that labial-velar stops in Sakata are not reported in recent surveys of these sounds which include the DRC (Idiatov & Van de Velde 2021), we deemed it useful to make available this exploratory phonetic and historical-phonological study based on new fieldwork data. In section 2, we discuss the state of the art concerning the Sakata language and people. In section 3, we present the methodology and process of data collection. In section 4, we provide as complete a spectrographic description of labial-velar stops as possible, despite some important limitations, notably the scarcity of the available data and the lack of balance in our small corpus. In spite of these issues, the present contribution represents to date the first phonetically grounded report and analysis of labial-velar stops in a severely under-documented area of the African continent, arguably one of the least well-surveyed linguistic areas of the planet (Hammarström 2016). In section 5, we offer a few articulatory-phonological considerations on affricates as a substitute for labial-velar stops in kiNgingele, showing how a theoretical model that has proved useful in explaining the emergence of labial-velar stops in other languages falls short of its goal in the case of this particular Sakata variety. In section 6, we set forth some historical considerations on the diagnostic power of labial-velars as a tool to reconstruct the heterogeneous linguistic past of the Lower Kasai region. Conclusions are presented in section 7.