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A Socio-Phonetic Investigation of Rhotics in Persian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Yasaman Rafat
Yasaman Rafat*
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Torontoyasaman.rafat@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

This paper fills in the gap in the literature by providing an acoustic analysis of rhotics in Persian and considers the social variables gender and register. Through the acoustic analysis of 807 tokens, it demonstrates that that there are a number of rhotic variants in Persian in different positions in the word and finds evidence of degemination in coda position, against previous accounts. Furthermore, it suggests that on the one hand, Tehrani-Persian speaking men and women's rhotic production patterns with those of Arabic societies as men favor rhotics with more complex articulations. On the other hand it questions whether the behavior of Tehrani-Persian speaking men and women conforms to established sociolinguistic norms regarding prestige and gender.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 5: On Persian Language and Linguistics , December 2010 , pp. 667 - 682
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2010

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Footnotes

She acknowledges the generous guidance of her advisor Professor Laura Colantoni and the helpful suggestions of Elham Rohany Rahbar and Natalia Mazzaro.

References

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26 The term vowel assimilation is correctly referred to as “vowel harmony.”

27 An articulatory study is needed to distinguish between taps and flaps in Persian.

28 Some would call these fricative trills.

29 Approximants did sound retroflex. However, as there is no general consensus in the literature as to what the acoustic correlates of approximants are, this parameter was not looked into. An articulatory study would also shed light on the issue of retroflection in Persian rhotics.

30 The length contrast was also maintained in minimal pairs such as <kore> “globe” and <korre> “young of certain animals.”

31 Despite what Mahootian (Persian) has proposed, degemination in word final position was not categorical.

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33 I am not suggesting that the difference between Tehrani Persian in the reading style and the vernacular Tehrani Persian is anywhere as close to the difference between literary and vernacular Arabic. However, the difference is larger than the reading style and the vernacular in English. In my opinion, some of the other differences include the rate of the application of vowel harmony and the pronunciation of vowels prior to word final /m/ or /n/.