An acoustic phonetic study of six accents of urdu in pakistan
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Date
2015
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UMT Lahore
Abstract
Urdu is a lingua franca, an official language (Mahmood, 2004) and the mother tongue of
only 7.5% population in Pakistan (Zia, 2011). The present study deals with an acoustic
phonetic analysis which is conducted for finding out the accent variation in Pakistani
Urdu. As, we know, Pakistan is a multilingual country therefore the purpose of the
research is to analyze the influence of the other languages on Urdu. This research is based
on quantitative methodology. The list of the 139 district names has been used as a corpus.
The recording of the utterances by the speakers of Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto
and Saraiki languages have been collected by developing a system for online data
collection. 30 Volunteers of each language have been enrolled to provide recordings for
speech corpus. The corner vowels from the utterances have been evaluated by comparing
them with the acoustic properties. Accent differences are acoustic manifestations of
differences in duration, pitch, intonation pattern and of course the difference in phonetic
transcription (Yan & Vaseghi, 2002). As this is the first step in the work of an acoustic
phonetic study of Urdu accents therefore only variations of vowels have been identified
by measuring the formant frequencies manually in PRAAT software. The preliminary
analysis of first and second formant frequencies showed the differences in the
characteristics of vowels. This research has verified that the formant frequencies of the
vowels (uttered by the speakers of six major languages) show differences and variations
across phonetic context. This is due to the fact that Urdu is the second or third language
for Pakistani speakers (Rehman, 2002). It has also verified that some utterances are
showing more similar values of formant frequencies (of the speakers‟ utterances) than the
others e.g. the formant frequencies in the utterances of Urdu and Punjabi speakers while
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the other showing more variant and dissimilar formant tendencies as in the case of Urdu,
Punjabi and Sindhi language speak.