An acoustic and prosodic investigation of Woleaian quotative speech

Woleaian (woe, Austronesian), is a Micronesian language spoken on a number of atolls in the Federated States of Micronesia. In Woleaian naturalistic speech, direct quotative speech (i.e., He said: “I want that” versus indirect he said he wants that) is characterized by a large rise in the speaker’s pitch into a falsetto register. Pitch steadily decreases throughout the utterance, but is reset at the start of each utterance as long as speakers continue to quote. In general, pitch is roughly doubled, shown in the rise to 400 Hz during quotative speech, from 150–200Hz in regular intonation for one speaker. Exploratory investigation of this phenomenon in Mayer (2025) has indicated that this is a common feature in Woleaian discourse and, according to speakers is used by all genders and age groups, as well as being a notable and distinctive feature specifically in Woleaian. Additionally, this seems to be a cross-linguistically exceedingly rare phenomenon, with to the author’s knowledge no parallel examples globally. This paper continues the investigation of the acoustic properties of Woleaian quotative speech using novel data in order to gain a better understanding of its properties, its role in the language’s phonology, as well as its prosodical-pragmatic functions.