A preliminary account of the Thangal sound system

Abstract

This work presents instrumental acoustic analysis of Thangal, a severely under-resourced Tibeto-Burman language spoken primarily in the Senapati District of Manipur by around 2500 people. While some research has been conducted in recent years on related languages such as Rongmei, and several Thangal wordlists compiled mainly from data collected in the 1800s also exist, linguistic investigation of Thangal in the past century has been limited at best, and empirical phonetic investigation is nonexistent. We use data from wordlists produced by native Thangal speakers to compile a preliminary phonetic inventory of the language and map the Thangal vowel space. Initial notable observations include the existence of prenasalized plosives and both aspirated and unaspirated consonants. This work was undertaken at the request of the community, whose ultimate hope is to develop a practical orthography in service to developing written materials in Thangal.