A STUDY ON THE VOWELS AND VOWEL LENGTH OF THE TANGSA LANGUAGE

The Tangsa language belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. It is spoken by the Tangsa people of Myanmar and North-eastern India. This language is recognized as an underdeveloped language, though it has a great deal of speakers both in India and Myanmar, especially in the Trans-Border areas. In this paper it is an attempt to find out the basic phonological features of vowels of the Tangsa language. The premises that I pursued to establish the phonemic inventory and their distributions are – • Listing the suspicious pairs of sounds from collected data. • Phonetic interpretation. • Phonetic similarity. There are only six vowels in Tangsa language and five of them have obtained short and long distinction. Vowel length may not enable identification of any individual vowel, but does help the listener to distinguish spectrally similar vowels or place vowels in large categories. That's why vowel length study is played a significant rule to study in such languages.