An acoustic analysis of the vowels and stop consonants of Bashkir

Abstract

Bashkir is a language of the Volga-Kipchak branch of the Turkic language family, spoken by approximately 1.2 million ethnic Bashkirs primarily in the autonomous Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia. Minimal research has been conducted on Bashkir in English, and what research has been conducted in either Russian or English focuses on the morphophonemics, syntax, and semantics of the language: acoustic investigation of Bashkir, meanwhile, is nearly nonexistent. This study is a preliminary examination of the phonetics of Bashkir. Using data from a female native speaker in her early 50s from Ufa, Bashkortostan, we present instrumental analysis of vowels in both pre-stressed and stressed positions, as well as voice onset time measures for oral stops. The vocalic data, in particular, are surprising in multiple ways: while they largely align with descriptions of the Bashkir vowel space provided by previous sources, with mid vowels that are reduced in most positions and that also have a large, variable range in the vowel space, they also suggest that the realization of one vowel phoneme may differ substantially from previous descriptions.