Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T10:58:44.306Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A cross-dialectal acoustic study of the monophthongs and diphthongs of Welsh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2011

Robert Mayr  and
Hannah Davies
Robert Mayr
Affiliation:
Centre for Speech and Language Therapy, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, UKrmayr@uwic.ac.ukh.d.davies@uwic.ac.uk
Hannah Davies
Affiliation:
Centre for Speech and Language Therapy, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, UKrmayr@uwic.ac.ukh.d.davies@uwic.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Welsh language has a complex vowel inventory with up to thirteen monophthongs and the same number of diphthongs. According to descriptive reports, systematic differences are found between the two main varieties of Welsh, Northern and Southern Welsh (Ball & Williams 2001, Jones 1984). However, few studies have attempted to verify these claims instrumentally, and little is known about the acoustic properties of Welsh vowels. The present study is the first systematic acoustic investigation of the monophthongs and diphthongs of Northern and Southern Welsh and includes measurements of formant trajectory length and spectral rate of change for the diphthongs (Fox & Jacewicz 2009).

The results largely confirm claims about contrastive vowel categories in Northern and Southern Welsh. In contrast to auditory-based accounts, however, pairs of Northern Welsh vowels were found to differ, not only in terms of duration, but also vowel quality. The diphthongs, in turn, revealed interesting cross-dialectal differences in spectral dynamics across their trajectories. The results have implications for notions of contrastivity in languages with large vowel inventories.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , April 2011 , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © International Phonetic Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Awbery, Gwenllian M. 1984. Phonotactic constraints in Welsh. In Ball & Jones (eds.), 65–104.Google Scholar
Ball, Martin J. 1983. A spectrographic investigation of three Welsh diphthongs. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 13, 82–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ball, Martin J. 1984. Phonetics for phonology. In Ball & Jones (eds.), 5–39.Google Scholar
Ball, Martin J. (ed.). 1988. The use of Welsh: A contribution to sociolinguistics. Clevedon & Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Ball, Martin J. 1988a. Accounting for linguistic variation: dialectology. In Ball (ed.), 7–23.Google Scholar
Ball, Martin J. 1988b. The study of pronunciation patterns. In Ball (ed.), 49–57.Google Scholar
Ball, Martin J., Griffiths, Tweli & Jones, Glyn E.. 1988. Broadcast Welsh. In Ball (ed.), 182–199.Google Scholar
Ball, Martin J. & Jones, Glyn E. (eds.). 1984. Welsh phonology: Selected readings. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Ball, Martin J. & Müller, Nicole. 1992. Mutation in Welsh. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ball, Martin J. & Williams, Briony. 2001. Welsh phonetics. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. 2008. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (version 5.0). http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/ (7 July 2008).Google Scholar
Bohn, Ocke-Schwen. 2004. How to organize a fairly large vowel inventory: The vowels of Fering (North Frisian). Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34 (2), 161–173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clopper, Cynthia G., Pisoni, David P. & de Jong, Kenneth. 2005. Acoustic characteristics of the vowel systems of six regional varieties of American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 118 (3), 1661–1676.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davies, Cennard. 1988. Cymraeg Byw. In Ball (ed.), 200–210.Google Scholar
Escudero, Paola, Boersma, Paul, Rauber, Andréia S. & Bion, Ricardo A. H.. 2009. A cross-dialect acoustic description of vowels: Brazilian and European Portuguese. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 126 (3), 1379–1393.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferguson, Charles A. 1959. Diglossia. Word 15, 325–340.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, Robert A. & Jacewicz, Ewa. 2009. Cross-dialectal variation in formant dynamics of American English vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 126 (5), 2603–2618.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller & Thomas, Enlli Môn. 2009. Bilingual first-language development: Dominant language takeover, threatened minority language take-up. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12 (2), 213–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, François. 1989. Neurolinguists beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and Language 36, 3–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, François. 2001. The bilingual's language modes. In Nicol, Janet (ed.), One mind two languages: Bilingual language processing, 1–22. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jones, Berwyn P. 1988. Official Welsh. In Ball (ed.), 172–181.Google Scholar
Jones, Dafydd G. 1988. Literary Welsh. In Ball (ed.), 125–171.Google Scholar
Jones, Glyn E. 1982. Hyd y llafariaid yn y Gymraeg: III. Y llafariaid hanner hir. Studia Celtica 16/17, 209–213.Google Scholar
Jones, Glyn E. 1984. The distinctive vowels and consonants of Welsh. In Ball & Jones (eds.), 40–64.Google Scholar
Maddieson, Ian. 1984. Patterns of sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maddieson, Ian. 2008. Vowel quality inventories. In Haspelmath, Martin, Dryer, Matthew S., Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.), The world atlas of language structures online, Chapter 2. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library. http://wals.info/feature/2 (8 April 2010).Google Scholar
Mayr, Robert. 2005. The perception and production of German monophthongs by British learners of German. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sheffield.Google Scholar
Mayr, Robert & Davies, Hannah. 2009. The monophthongs and diphthongs of North-eastern Welsh: An acoustic study. 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2009), Brighton, UK. 2315–2318.Google Scholar
Morrison, Geoffrey S. & Escudero, Paola. 2007. A cross-dialect comparison of Peninsular- and Peruvian-Spanish vowels. 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVI), Saarbrücken, Germany. 1505–1508.Google Scholar
Morrison, Geoffrey S. & Nearey, Terrance M.. 2007. Testing theories of vowel-inherent spectral change. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 122, EL15–EL22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nearey, Terrance M. & Assmann, Peter F.. 1986. Modelling the role of inherent spectral change in vowel identification. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 80 (5), 1297–1308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oftedal, Magne. 1969. A new approach to North Welsh vowels. Lochlann 4, 243–269.Google Scholar
Steinlen, Anja K. 2005. The influence of consonants on native and non-native vowel production: A cross-linguistic study. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Thomas, Alan R. 1973. The linguistic geography of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, Alan R. 1988. Studying lexical geography. In Ball (ed.), 41–48.Google Scholar
Thomas, Enlli Môn & Gathercole, Virginia C. Mueller. 2007. Children's productive command of grammatical gender and mutation in Welsh: An alternative to rule-based learning. First Language 27, 251–278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tsukada, Kimiko. 2002. An acoustic comparison between American English and Australian English vowels. 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2002), Denver, Colorado, USA. 2257–2260.Google Scholar
Yu, Jue, Li, Aijun & Wang, Xia. 2004. A contrastive investigation of diphthongs between Standard Mandarin and Shanghai accented Mandarin. International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages with Emphasis on Tone Languages, 229–234, Beijing, China.Google Scholar