DYNAMIC ACOUSTIC PROPERTIES OF PAKISTANI ENGLISH: A DESCRIPTION OF FORMANT VARIATIONS OF F1 & F2 PRODUCED BY PAKISTANI SPEAKERS

Abstract

The current study explores the variations of formant frequency of English vowels produced by eighty students of BS English and English language at NUML and International Islamic University Islamabad. The research defines the acoustic monophthongal variations under the influence of gender and four standard regional varieties of Pakistan and presents a macro-level description of Monophthongs of Pakistani English. The respondents belong to Balochi, Pushto, Punjabi, and Sindhi languages. This study explores monophthongal formant variations among these speakers through the lenses of the ‘Formant Frequency Model’ (Lindblom, 1979). For this purpose, the poem entitled, “The North Wind and the Sun” has been used to collect the required data. The formant values have been extracted from PRAAT, a software presented by (Boersma & Weenink, 2019). The manually extracted data from PRAAT were analyzed via statistical tools of SPSS and ANOVA. The findings of this research disclose that monophthongal formant variations are related to the unclear realization of sounds like /ə / and /ʌ/, paucity in realizing the vowel pairs of English, identical articulation of /ɒ/ and /ͻ:/ among the groups. The findings of the research would contribute to the phonological system of Pakistani English, which is an Asian- variety of the Outer-Circle. The findings would assist English language teachers to teach pronunciation of English with an acoustic-phonetic perspective. Keywords: PakE, Acoustic & Statistical Analysis, Formant Frequencies, Monophthongs