A Sociophonetic Analysis of Lexical and Epenthetic Vowels in Iraqi Arabic

Abstract

In recent years, a considerable research has been conducted to examine epenthetic vowels (Alghamdi, 1998; Hall, 2006, 2013; Gouskova & Hall, 2007, 2013) This paper aims at investigating epenthetic vowel in word onset CC cluster in the Arabic dialect of Hit, Iraq (HIA) from an acoustic perspective. It provides an acoustic analysis of vowel epenthesis in this dialect and presents phonetic correlations between the lexical and epenthetic vowel /a/ in singleton contexts. This study builds on previous studies that investigated temporal and spectral i.e. vowel duration and formant frequencies F1 and F2 characteristics of epenthetic and lexical vowels in several Arabic dialects. It has been reported that in HIA the short vowel /a/ is elided in open unstressed syllables, resulting in onset two consonant clusters. For example, the word /bana:t/ „girls‟ is pronounced as [bana:t] in Standard Arabic and Baghdadi Iraqi dialect, while in HIA it is pronounced as [bna:t]. It has been observed that this dialect began to insert an epenthetic vowel within onset CC clusters. Despite this fact, no previous acoustic analyses of this type have been conducted on this dialects. The present paper presents an empirical evidence to the universal as well as language-specific acoustic features of lexical and epenthetic vowels and relates such evidence to social variables i.e. speakers‟ gender. Ten native HIA speakers were recorded (5 males/ 5females), their average age is 35. All participants were born and raised in Hit and were doing their postgraduate studies at the time of conducting the recordings. In total, the ten participants produced 480 tokens as included in a carrier sentence /aqu:l……. marte:n/ „I say……twice‟. Acoustic measurements have shown that there are considerable spectral and temporal differences among speakers; all speakers produced shorter, higher and baker epenthetic than lexical [a]. In terms of gender differences, male speakers produced higher and more retracted lexical and epenthetic /a/ than female peers There were significant gender variations across HIA speakers in the production of epenthetic and lexical vowels.