Vowel-Based Acoustic and Prosodic Study of Three Manipuri Dialects

Abstract

The analysis of segmental and supra-segmental characteristics provides vital cues to dialectal variation of a language. There has been no comparative study on acoustic and prosodic features of the dialects of Manipuri. In this paper, we present a description of dialectal variation for three of the major dialects of Manipuri, namely Imphal, Kakching and Sekmai, based on the observation and analysis of speech data. The Imphal dialect spoken by the speakers, who live in the capital city of Manipur state known as Imphal, is taken to be the standard form for Manipuri language. Kakching and Sekmai dialect speakers live in Kakching and Awang Sekmai, respectively. Formant frequency, segment duration, energy values and pitch values are measured to study the vowel characteristics. The findings of the study show that dialectal variation is well represented by acoustic and prosodic variations in the three dialects. This preliminary analysis will be helpful for a more detailed comparative study of Manipuri dialects in the future.