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On the variability of vocalic inventory in Black South African English 59
vowel could push the off-glide vowel towards the center of the vocalic spectrum.
Figure 4. Square in BSAE (Mboniswa, CD accompanying Varieties of English textbook)
Moreover, a closer look at the values of F1 in the formant listing shows that
there is indeed little to almost no movement throughout the targeted vowel, and
that a lot of errors should actually be corrected by hand if a real vocalic glide
were involved. Hence, I can conclude that this speaker has five diphthongs and
two monophthongs which add up to her inventory of monophthongs: /aɪ/, /ɔɪ/,
/ɛɪ/, /ʌʊ/, /oʊ/, /e/ and /o/.
3. Conclusions
The analysis above has shown that BSAE displays a lot of variation along
the basilect-acrolect continuum. Although there is a core vocalic system made
up of five basic vowel phonemes, this may vary across the lectal continuum and
from one speaker to another. Phonological processes such as assimilation and
harmony can be also observed in this variety. Rising diphthongs seem to be
better represented than falling diphthongs in BSAE, the latter undergoing monophthongization
in most of the cases. Subsequent analyses of the vowels on
the available corpora for different reading styles (reading passage style and
interviews) will probably show that there is even more variation since other
factors such as pace, connected speech effects, turn-taking and so on may interfere.