For bilinguals, Enxet vowel spaces smaller than Spanish

Abstract

This study compares the vowel spaces of bilingual speakers of Spanish and Enxet Sur (ISO 639-3: enx), a moderately threatened language spoken by around 4000 speakers in the Paraguayan Chaco which purportedly lacks high vowels. The Enxet vowel system has only three phonemic vowel qualities /e,a,o/ and a length distinction. Using recorded natural speech data from two Enxet/Spanish bilinguals, formant values for vowel tokens are used to establish phonetic targets and acoustic vowel clouds for each of the phonemic vowels in both languages. A comparison of these vowel spaces suggests that an individual bilingual speaker uses a smaller vowel space when speaking Enxet (less vowel height, higher minimum F1 frequencies) than when speaking Spanish. Languages like Enxet lacking in true high vowels present problems for the theory of adaptive dispersion in that they do not “take advantage” of maximal distinctiveness in the acoustic and articulatory quality of their vowels. This is the first known phonetic investigation of an Enlhet-Enenlhet language.