Acoustic properties of the vowel systems of Bolivian Quechua/Spanish bilinguals

Abstract

This paper describes the vowel systems of Quechua/Spanish bilinguals in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and examines these systems to illuminate variation between phonemic and allophonic vowels in this Quechua variety. South Bolivian Quechua is described as phonemically trivocalic, and Bolivian Spanish is described as pentavocalic (Cerrón-Palomino 1994). Although South Bolivian Quechua has three vowel categories, Quechua uvular stop consonants promote high vowel lowering, effectively lowering /i/ and /u/ towards space otherwise occupied by /e/ and /o/ respectively, producing a system with five surface vowels but three phonemic vowels (Buckley 2000). The project was conducted with eleven Quechua/Spanish bilinguals from the Cochabamba department in Bolivia. Subjects participated in a Spanish to Quechua oral translation task and a word list task in Spanish. Results indicate that Quechua/Spanish bilinguals maintain separate vowel systems. In the Spanish vowel systems, each vowel occupies its own space and backness. A one-way ANOVA reveals that /i/ is higher and fronter than /e/, and /u/ is higher than /o/ (p<0.05). The Quechua vowel systems are somewhat more variable, with substantial overlap between /i/ and /e/, and between /u/ and /o/. Potential explanations for this result include lexical conditioning, speaker literacy effects, and differences in realizations of phonemic versus allophonic vowels.