Acoustic and articulatory investigation of the Mauritian vowel inventory

Abstract

While there have been a decent amount of morphosyntactic and sociolinguistic studies on Mauritian, a “French-based” creole spoken by most of the population of Mauritius (e.g., Baker, 1972; Alleesaib, 2012; Henri, 2010; Miller, 2015; Syea, 2013), phonetic or phonological description on the language hardly exists. Pudaruth (1993) proposes a phoneme inventory consisting of 19 consonants and 8 vowels, intuitively noting that rhotics preceding vowels are weakened, almost unpronounced. In the present work, we empirically investigate the vowel inventory of Mauritian using acoustic and articulatory data. In addition to presenting basic acoustic measures (e.g., vowel spaces), we note the presence of a rhotic, and report acoustic measures which suggest strong variation between the orthographic “a” that precedes “r” and that which precedes all other written consonants. Ultrasound imaging confirms that the pre-rhotic “a” differs from other “as articulatorily.