Experimental Study of Vowels in Nagamese, Ao and Lotha: Languages of Nagaland

This paper describes the vowels characteristics of three languages of Nagaland namely Nagamese, Ao and Lotha. For this study, nucleus vowel duration, formant structure (1 st and 2 nd formant i.e. F1 and F2) and intensity of vowels are investigated and analyzed for these languages. This paper includes the nasal context for different vowels and tries to examine its importance in different languages. A detailed analysis is carried out for six vowels namely  for readout speech of Nagamese, Ao and Lotha. Result shows that the vowel duration and formants play important roles in differentiating vowels characteristics. On the other hand, intensity of vowels do not play significant role in the characteristics of the vowels across the languages is observed. This initial study unveil the importance of vowels characteristics and may help to do research and development in the area of language identification, synthesis, speech recognition of three north-eastern languages of Nagaland.