Abstract
Hmong languages, particularly White Hmong, are well studied for their complex tone systems that incorporate pitch, phonation, and duration differences. Still, prior work has made use mostly of tones elicited in their citation forms in carrier phrases. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of both the vowel and tone systems of White Hmong from recordings of read speech. We confirm several features of the language, including the presence of nasal vowels (rather than derived nasalized vowels through coarticulation with a coda [ŋ]), the description of certain tone contours, and the systematic presence of breathy and creaky voice on two of the tones. We also find little evidence of additional intonational f0 targets. However, we show that some tones vary greatly by their position in utterance, and propose novel descriptions for several of them. Finally, we show that $\textrm{H}1^{\!*}$ –H2*, a widely used measure of voice quality and phonation in Hmong and across languages, does not adequately distinguish modal from non-modal phonation in this data set, and argue that noise measures like Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP) are more robust to phonation differences in corpora with more variability.
Highlights
White Hmong (Hmoob Dawb, known as Hmong Daw) is a West Hmongic language, belonging to the larger Hmong-Mien language family
Given that nasal vowels often end in a nasal coda (e.g. /e/ → [eN]), there has been some discussion in the literature as to whether the nasal coda should be treated as phonemic or not in both White Hmong and Green Mong (Andruski & Ratliff 2000; see similar discussion for nasal vowels in Brazilian Portugese; Barlaz et al 2018, Marques & Scarborough 2020)
This study provided an in-depth description of the vowels and tones in White Hmong, as they occur in whole utterances from read speech
Summary
White Hmong (Hmoob Dawb, known as Hmong Daw) is a West Hmongic language, belonging to the larger Hmong-Mien language family. Relatively understudied from the point of view of its morpho-phonology, syntax, and semantics (see Fuller 1987, Riddle 1994, Creswell & Snyder 2000, Jarkey 2010), the phonetic properties of tone and phonation in the language are fairly well researched. This is due in part to the fact that ‘language description frequently focuses on aspects of a language that are notable from an areal, typological, or theoretical perspective’ (DiCanio et al 2019: 333). Journal of the International Phonetic Association, page 1 of 20
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