Vowels in the Barunga variety of north Australian Kriol

Caroline Jones, Katherine Demuth, Weicong Li, Andre Almeida

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperConference Paperpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

![CDATA[North Australian Kriol is an English based creole spoken widely by Indigenous people in northern Australia in areas where the traditional languages are endangered or no longer spoken. This paper offers the first acoustic description of the vowel phonology of Roper Kriol, within a variety spoken at Barunga Community, east of the town of Katherine in the Northern Territory. Drawing on a new corpus for Barunga Kriol, the paper presents analyses of the short and long monophthongs, as well as the diphthongs in the spontaneous speech of young adults. The results show the durations and spectral characteristics of the vowels, including major patterns of allophony (i.e. coarticulation and context effects). This updates the phonology over the previous description from the 1970s, showing that there is an additional front low vowel phoneme in the speech of young people today, as well as a vowel length contrast. Interestingly there are points of similarity with the vowel acoustics for traditional Aboriginal languages of the region, for example in a relatively compact vowel space and in the modest trajectories of diphthongs.]]
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2017), August 20-24, 2017, Stockholm, Sweden
PublisherInternational Speech Communication Association
Pages219-223
Number of pages5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017
EventINTERSPEECH (Conference) -
Duration: 20 Aug 2017 → …

Publication series

Name
ISSN (Print)2308-457X

Conference

ConferenceINTERSPEECH (Conference)
Period20/08/17 → …

Keywords

  • Kriol language
  • Northern Territory
  • phonetics
  • vowels

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