LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 11 : 11 November 2011
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.

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The Acoustic Analysis of Pashto Vowels

Riaz-ud-Din, Ph.D. (Linguistics) Scholar
Ghani Rahman, Ph.D. (Linguistics) Scholar

Abstract The study investigates the acoustic analysis of Pashto vowels. The materials included carrier minimal pairs which were produced by a group of ten Pashto native speakers of Yuzafzi dialect. The recorded vowel sounds, 9 in number, were acoustically analyzed. The durations of those vowels were recorded and tabulated along with their respective F1 and F2 frequencies. These vowel sounds were then mapped on a quadrilateral giving us the idiosyncratic quality of Pashto vowels.

Introduction

Pashto is an Eastern Indo-Iranian language. It has forty to fifty million speakers. Pashto is a dominant language in Southern Afghanistan and most parts of Balochistan and NWFP in Pakistan. It is also one of the two national languages of Afghanistan. Pashto is also taught up to secondary level in NWFP. It has five major dialects (Rahman (2009). The dialect under research is the Yusafzi dialect.

Many impressionistic studies have been done on the Pashto vowels; but none of them are based on the scientific speech processing research. These studies are more phonologically based than phonetic in nature. The main reason behind the present study is to check the phonetic (acoustic) structure of those vocalic sounds and provide a sound base for further phonetic research on scientific grounds.

Literature Review

Various inventories of Pashto vowels have been proposed in previous studies. These inventories relate to the different dialects of Pashto. For example, the study of Tegey and Robson (1996) is based on the central dialect of Pashto spoken in the main areas of Afghanistan. According to this inventory, there are nine vowel sounds in central dialect of Pashto. Another such proposed inventory (Yusafzi dialect) is by Hallberg (1992) wherein eleven vowels inventory has been proposed. A third inventory based on the combination of Kandahar and Kabul dialect consisting of seven vowels has been proposed by Lavi Susannah (2004).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Riaz-ud-Din
Ph.D. (Linguistics) scholar
Department of English
University of AJK
Muzafarabad
Pakistan
riazuddin66@yahoo.com

Ghani Rahman
Ph.D. (Linguistics) Scholar
Department of English
University of AJK
Muzafarabad
Pakistan
ghani_saba@yahoo.com
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