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Abstract
Hindkois a member of the Indo-Aryan languagefamily and had several regionaldialects. It is mainly spoken in Hagara division; Khyber Pukhtonkhawa province of Pakistan. This paper aims to present an acoustic analysis of Hindko oral vowels. The data is recorded involving Hindko native speakers, who live in Hazara division, in consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) context. All the data is recorded using high fidelity microphone directly on PRAAT software. And the analysis is carried out using PRAAT software package (Boersma, 2012). A statistical package for social sciences (SPSS') is used for statistical analysis where possible. The analysis reveals that Hindko oral vowels have a phonemic durational contrast and with the help of formant features classified as front, central and back vowels. In addition to this, the study of formants also determines the acoustic space as the short vowels cover less space than the long ones.
Keywords: acoustic analysis, oral vowels, durational contrast, formants, acousticspace
1. Introduction
Hindko belongs to the Indo-Aryan family of languages which has several dialects on a regional basis (Lothers & Lothers, 2010). Hazara dialect is one of its main dialects that is spoken in Hazara division; Khyber Pukhtonkhawa province of Pakistan. The majority of Hindko speakers live in this area (Haroon & Sohail, 2011).
According to Haroon and Akhtar (2012) there are nine oral vowels in Hindko. Out of these nine, four are front /i, I, æ, e/ two are central /a, 0/ and three are back /u, ü, of. The length contrast is found in the pairs /i - l/, /a- 0/ and /u- ü/ while there is no length contrast for /e, æ, 0/ as these have no counterpart short vowels. The table given below presents word level distribution of Hindko oral vowels:
This table 1 illustrates that only short vowels /1, a, u/ do not occur word finally.
Vowel inventories differ in size from language to language. Maddieson's (1984) survey of 317 languages demonstrates that 5.7% languages have only three vowels, 4.1% have 17 or more vowels. On the basis of size, he classifies vowel inventories into three categories namely small (2-4), average (5-6) and large (7-14). The vowel inventory of Hindko is a large one. Haroon and Akhtar (2012) document the vowel system of Hindko. They regard it a...