An acoustic examination of Drehu vowels

Abstract

Drehu is an indigenous language spoken in New Caledonia. Compared to other Oceanic languages, it has rather large vowel and consonantal inventories. The vowel system consists of 14 vowels, distinguishing seven vowel qualities and an additional length distinction. Previous phonological studies showed divergent proposals for two of the vowel qualities /ɛ/ and /ə/ based on impressionistic descriptions. For this study, data was collected through a controlled reading task that was conducted during a fieldwork trip. We investigate the Drehu vowels for the first time, using acoustic data from eight native speakers (4 female). Vowel duration, formant values and dynamic formant properties were measured to examine the phonetic correlates of the proposed phonological vowel quality and length distinctions. In this study, we report seven timbres identified across the fourteen vowels of the system. Our results confirm a distinction between phonologically long and short vowels based on duration differences. We provide a detailed acoustic description of the vowel system and propose a revised vowel inventory based on a detailed analysis of formant structure of open-mid /ɛ/ and the central vowel /ə/.