Re-syllabification and Multiple Pronunciations in Urdu

Abstract

This is a sequel work deals with the confirmation of phonological rules for re-syllabification and multiple pronunciations of Urdu vocabulary, at larger scale, in speech of Pakistani speakers. The motivation of study is the identification of re-syllabification and multiple pronunciations in 10 hours audio-corpus of a native Pakistani Urdu speaker. This speech corpus has identified 103902 words with different annotations. The observations have identified the multiple pronunciations of same tokens (Farooq & Mumtaz, 2016), (Farooq & Mahmood, 2020). These tokens have same parts-of-speech (POS), spellings and meanings but different pronunciations which ultimately becomes the cause of re-syllabification in different contexts. CLE annotated speech corpus has been used as baseline of this research (Mumtaz, et al., 2014), (Habib, Hijab, Hussain, & Adeeba, 2014). Later, the multiple pronunciations and re-syllabification phenomenon have been cross checked in the speech of 29 native Pakistani Urdu speakers for the identification and confirmation. Consequently, the results of data analysis have also confirmed; the re-syllabification is more context dependent rather than speaker dependent. Moreover, stress is major supra-segmental feature which becomes the reason of multiple pronunciations by causing segmental substitution and attain the status of alternative pronunciations (Farooq & Mumtaz, 2016). Multilingual effect also causes re-syllabification in Urdu lexical items in mental lexicon of speakers. The alternative pronunciations have been triggered by restructuring and re-syllabifications of Urdu vocabulary in speech of 30 Pakistani Urdu speakers. But this paper currently deals with the re-syllabification of Urdu vocabulary depending only on the phoneme or segment alternation. Finally, it is concluded that stress alternation is one major cause to raise re-syllabification and multiple pronunciations on Urdu speech in Pakistan. The multiple pronunciations will identified the rules of ‘word-level phonology’ in Urdu; based on some special rules as exceptions.