Acoustic Analysis of Central Vowels of PakE

Abstract

English, with its many representations around the world, serves as lingua franca among the nations with diverse languages and cultures. The term World Englishes was introduced to represent the diversity of English language. The current study is an acoustic investigation into Pakistani English to observe the phenomenon of central vowels. Researchers (Sailaja, 2009; Garesh, 2006; Kachru, 2005; Gonzalez & Alberca, 1978 as cited in Bautista & Gonzalez, 2006) have observed that in Asian Englishes, there is no distinction in the central vowels, i.e. /ə/, /ɜ:/ and /Λ/. For analysis, 20 subjects (10 male and 10 female) were chosen from BS English programme of University of Sargodha with Punjabi as their L1. Isolated words were recorded using a career phrase. Praat was used for acoustic measurement of the vowel formants. Conclusions were drawn that Pakistani speakers of English did not distinguish between the two vowels /ə/ and /ɜ:/. But the vowel /Λ/ was realized as a different vowel.  Hence, it was concluded that Pakistani English has two central vowels.