Gender, vowel harmony and accent: a typo-geographical view

Abstract

A clear understanding on the linguistic nature of both the languages to be taught and the language(s) of learners is always necessary for any effective language teaching. Because of the drastic typological diversities we find between Indo-European and Southeast Asian languages, this need is particularly acute in the Southeast Asian situation. Recent developments in the field of syntactic and phonological researches enable us to characterize Asian languages in contrast to Indo-European in some explicit terms unwitnessed in the past history of linguistic researches. The present paper endeavors to characterize some phonological aspects of Asian languages among the world community of natural languages. These aspects include Indo-European gender, number, etc., North Asian vowel harmony, accent, etc. and Southeast Asian tone-sandhi. Through abstracting the universal natures of these phonological-grammatical phenomena, the author would like to suggest a new treatment of these linguistic categories in the classrooms of Asian students.