Breathing life into vowelless words: How Tarifit rewrites the rules of sound

Out of all the words you know, which ones don’t have vowels? Except for a short “hm” or “Shhh!” probably not many, even if you’re thinking of a language other than English. To document these rare “vowelless” words and show how they might develop in real time, Mohamed Afkir and Georgia Zellou studied Tarifit, a Moroccan Amazigh language.

The team found that vowelless words in Tarifit are produced with longer aspiration — the puff of air you feel after you sound out a consonant, like “puh” for “p.” This lengthening consistently occurred no matter whether the speaker was speaking quickly or slowly. Even though aspiration time within words increased, however, the words themselves were shorter than their vowel-containing counterparts.

“These findings help us understand how rare sound patterns evolve and how languages reorganize their sound systems over time, especially in understudied and endangered languages like Tarifit,” Afkir said. “This is something that’s crucial for preserving linguistic diversity, for preserving valuable data from languages at risk of being lost, and for advancing models of speech processing and sound change.”

To investigate how vowelless words are produced in Tarifit, the researchers conducted fieldwork in Nador, Morocco, recording 37 native speakers saying specific words in different scenarios. Using acoustic analysis tools, they measured how long certain sounds — specifically voiceless aspirations — were when vowels were present versus when they were absent.

The authors hope their research can support the development of digital tools like text-to-speech for Tarifit, since only a few are available and accessible by the community.

Source: “Vowelless word forms in Tarifit are produced with longer voiceless aspiration intervals,” by Mohamed Afkir and Georgia Zellou, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039470 .