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Loakes, Deborah, Carr, Therese, Gawne, Lauren and Wigglesworth, Gillian (2015) 'Vowels in Wunambal, a Language of the North West Kimberley Region.' Australian Journal of Linguistics, 35 (3). pp. 203-231.

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Abstract

This paper presents an acoustic-phonetic analysis of vowel data from recordings of Wunambal, a Worrorran language of the Kimberley region in North West Australia. Wunambal has been analysed as a six vowel system with the contrasts /i e a o u ɨ/, with /ɨ/ only found in the Northern variety. Recordings from three senior (60+) male speakers of Northern Wunambal were used for this study. These recordings were originally made for documentation of lexical items. All vowel tokens were drawn from words in short carrier phrases, or words in isolation, and we compare vowels from both accented and unaccented contexts. We demonstrate a remarkably symmetrical vowel space, highlighting where the six vowels lie acoustically in relation to each other for the three speakers overall, and for each speaker individually. While all speakers in our corpus used the /ɨ/ vowel, the allophony observed suggests that it has a somewhat different phonemic status than other vowels. Accented and unaccented vowels are not significantly different for any speaker, and are similarly distributed in acoustic space.

Item Type: Journal Article
SOAS Departments & Centres: Legacy Departments > Faculty of Languages and Cultures > Department of Linguistics
ISSN: 07268602
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2015.1023169
Date Deposited: 24 Feb 2017 17:06
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/23719

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