The sounds of Japanese English: Monophthong vowels and rhythmic patterning

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers finer-grained acoustic analyses of two aspects of the linguistic sound system of Japanese English (JpE): monophthongal vowels and rhythmic patterning. At the segmental level, though past research has examined the vocalic inventory of JpE, these studies have tended to focus on vowel quality differences in the acoustic space. Our study approaches the acoustic investigation of monophthongal vowels in JpE by examining not just vowel quality, but also vowel duration. At the level of prosody, we conduct a quantitative analysis of the rhythm of JpE using the pairwise variability index. Results suggest that monophthongal vowels in JpE do not exhibit a homogeneous pattern of ‘conflation’ in terms of vowel quality or duration, and that JpE tends towards a stress-timed patterning of speech rhythm. Hence, the empirical data argue for the need of a ‘pluricentric’ paradigm to undergird world Englishes research, rather than a ‘monolithic’, Inner Circle norm-centric framework.