Acoustic characteristics of variation in vowels in Assamese

Abstract

This study provides an overview of acoustic characteristics of the vowel system in three regional varieties of Assamese. Recordings were made of 24 speakers producing the vowels /i/, /e/, /ɛ/, /ɑ/, /u/, /ʊ/, /o/ and /ɔ/ from a wordlist of 128 tokens. The speakers came from three locations in Assam, India: namely Lower Assam, Upper Assam, and Guwahati, and were balanced for region, sex, age, and education background. Acoustic analysis was conducted in Praat. First, the formant settings for male and female speakers were adjusted accordingly: 5500 Hz for female speakers and 5000 Hz for male speakers, where the vowel onsets and offsets were identified perceptually in the waveform, coinciding with the spectrogram in Praat. First and second formants were measured at the midpoint of the vowels for each of the 24 talkers, for a total of 9216 formant measurements. Formant measurements were then plotted on an F1xF2 chart using R. Findings show that Upper Assamese speakers had a high /ʊ/ production, while Lower Assam speakers had a low /ʊ/ in the acoustic space, while within Guwahati, more educated speakers produced /ʊ/ that was higher compared to speakers with less education.