An acoustic analysis of Sylheti phonemes

This paper examines the acoustic properties of Sylheti phonemes. Sylheti is generally regarded as one of the varieties of Bangla. The historical development of this language witnessed significant reduction and reconstruction of its phoneme inventory. The phoneme inventory is considerably reduced due to the phonological process of deaspiration [+spread glottis], spirantization and deaffrication (Gope & Mahanta, 2014). We conducted an acoustic experiment and measured the voiced onset time (VOT) of all the voiced stops. The result of one-way ANOVA did not show any significant interaction among the obstruents in terms of aspiration (p > 0.05, [F (1, 359) = 0.095, p = 0.76)]. In a separate experiment, we examined the acoustic qualities of Sylheti vowels. Results confirm the presence of 5 vowels in Sylheti. A one way ANOVA confirmed significance effect on vowel quality in terms of duration [F (4, 600) = 57.77, p = 0.00] and (first three) formants values.