Phonetic correlates of phonological quantity of Yakut

Abstract

We investigated vowel quantity in Yakut (Sakha), a Turkic language spoken in Siberia by over 400,000 speakers in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation. Yakut is a quantity language; all vowel and consonant phonemes have short and long contrastive counterparts. The study aims at revealing acoustic characteristics of the binary quantity distinction in vowels. We used two sets of data: (1) A female native Yakut speaker read a 200-word list containing disyllabic nouns and verbs with four different combinations of vowel length in the two syllables (short–short, short–long, long–short, and long–long) and a list of 50 minimal pairs differing only in vowel length; (2) Spontaneous speech data from 9 female native Yakut speakers (aged 19–77), 200 words with short vowels and 200 words with long vowels, were extracted for analysis. Acoustic measurements of the short and long vowels’ f0-values, duration and intensity were done. Mixed-effects models showed a significant durational difference between long and short vowels for both data sets. However, the preliminary results indicated that, unlike in quantity languages like Finnish and Estonian, there was no consistent effect of f0 as the phonetic correlate in Yakut vowel quantity distinction.