Vowels in Wunambal, a Language of the North West Kimberley Region

Abstract

This paper presents an acoustic-phonetic analysis of vowel data from recordings of Wunambal, a Worrorran language of the Kimberley region in North West Australia. Wunambal has been analysed as a six vowel system with the contrasts /i e a o u ɨ/, with /ɨ/ only found in the Northern variety. Recordings from three senior (60+) male speakers of Northern Wunambal were used for this study. These recordings were originally made for documentation of lexical items. All vowel tokens were drawn from words in short carrier phrases, or words in isolation, and we compare vowels from both accented and unaccented contexts. We demonstrate a remarkably symmetrical vowel space, highlighting where the six vowels lie acoustically in relation to each other for the three speakers overall, and for each speaker individually. While all speakers in our corpus used the /ɨ/ vowel, the allophony observed suggests that it has a somewhat different phonemic status than other vowels. Accented and unaccented vowels are not significantly different for any speaker, and are similarly distributed in acoustic space.

Acoustic Analysis of Vowels in Konkani

“…Agrawal et al presented an acoustic analysis for Hindi vowels for native and non-native speakers [1]. Chakrasali et al presented formant analysis for Kannada vowels speech signals [5], Loakes et al presented acoustic-phonetic analysis for the Wunambal language in Australia [9], Roux and Holtzhausen for the Xhosa Language in Africa [14] and Hillenbrand et al for the American English [7].…”