The sixth vowel in Vatlongos (Southeast Ambrym)
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Abstract
In addition to the five vowels most typically found in Oceanic languages, Vatlongos has a sixth vowel phoneme, a near-low front vowel /æ/ (Parker 1968). There are a few minimal pairs distinguishing it from /a/ and /e/, such as mai ‘reef’ or ‘pigeon’; mei ‘come’; mæi ‘3SG.NFUT.let’ or ‘hunger’.
However, it is lexically and phonologically restricted compared to other vowels. /æ/ usually occurs following a bilabial consonant, or preceding /h/, although there are exceptions. In some lexical and phonological contexts, /æ/ is in free variation with either /a/ or /e/. In a lexical database of over 3000 lexemes (excluding Bislama loanwords and proper nouns), /æ/ occurs in just 107 words. However, /æ/ is likely underrepresented due to tendencies to represent this sound with <a> or <e>. The orthographic representation of this vowel is an area of continuing discussion.
This paper will report results from a project to investigate the acoustic properties of the /æ/ phoneme. Around 1500 vowel tokens in two narrative recordings by the same female speaker were aligned in Praat textgrids, and the midpoint F1 and F2 extracted using the PraatR package (Albin 2014) in RStudio.
While data checking is still in progress, initial results show acoustic properties consistent with /æ/ as a low front vowel phoneme, overlapping with tokens of /e/ and /a/. As most tokens follow the prenasalised bilabial stop, we will also discuss the distribution of nasalised allophones. We have found patterns of intraspeaker lexical variation between /æ/, /e/ and /a/, including in phonological contexts where /æ/ is not predicted by Parker’s (1968) description. The phoneme /a/ in Bislama loanwords appears to be realised slightly differently, intermediate between Vatlongos /a/ and /æ/, suggesting that vowels in Bislama loanwords are not fully phonologically integrated.
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Keywords
vowels, acoustic phonetics, phoneme inventories, orthography
Citation
Ridge E. 2023-07-10 to 2023-07-13. The sixth vowel in Vatlongos (Southeast Ambrym). Vanuatu Languages Conference. National University Vanuatu, Port Vila, Vanuatu.