s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

On the variability of vocalic inventory in Black South African English 57
2500
2400
2300
Ǻ ~ i
2200
2100
2000
1900
1800
1700
1600
1500
1400
1300
1200
1100
1000
900
800
700
PRICE
FACE
F2-Backness (Hz)
ǫ
CHOICE
a
Ȝ
Ǥ
o
GOAT
MOUTH
u ~ Ț
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
1000
F1-Height (Hz)
Figure 2. Formant trajectories of BSAE rising diphthongs (Mboniswa)
As can be seen, the female speaker produces all the five rising diphthongs
mentioned by Van Rooy: FACE, PRICE, CHOICE, MOUTH and GOAT. Starting with
the diphthong PRICE, the first target is realized as an open low vowel, lower than
[ʌ], it actually starts off more in the area of [a], and its trajectory terminates in
the close-front region of the vowel space. The trajectory of the CHOICE diphthong
also ends in the area of the front close vowels but its offset vowel target is
rather tense as its mean F1 is of 431 Hz; the onset of its second vowel target is
close to the mid-open back round vowel [ɔ]. The offset vowel target of the FACE
diphthong is very similar to that of the PRICE diphthong, as they are very close
to each other in the vowel space, whereas its first vowel target is still in the area
of front vowels, more precisely, it is the mid-open front [ɛ]: remember that the
F1 of mid-open front [ɛ] in Table 1 was 482 Hz and the F1 value at the first
target time is 488 Hz. Moving on to the diphthongs whose trajectories’ offsets
are represented by back vowels, one can notice that the MOUTH diphthong displays
greater formant movement.
However, the GOAT diphthong clearly involves some gliding from one vocalic
position to another: it starts off in the area of the mid-close round back
vowel and it rises towards a close back round vowel which is rather lax than
tense if one maps the value of the F1 at the second target time (354 Hz) onto the
mean F1 of the FOOT or GOOSE vowels in Table 1 (somewhere around 300 Hz).
The trajectory of the MOUTH diphthong shows that it is a bit fronted at a certain
point, to end up in about the same vocalic position as the preceding one.
The falling diphthongs, not surprisingly, are commonly monophthongized.
Since the vowel schwa is avoided in BSAE, the second target vowel of the
original diphthong is usually lost and what remains behind is a monophthong.