An Acoustic Analysis of the Vowels of Lambada Language

The study aims at an acoustic description of the vowels of Lambada, a minor language with a special focus on the speakers of Telangana state. Lambada vowel inventory comprises of five short vowels i, , a, o, u, their longer counterparts i:,:, a:, o:, u: and two diphthongs ai, au. An acoustic experiment has been conducted with five native male speakers of Lambada and the description builds on the observations made by Peter Ladefoged and Bruce Hayes (Dept; Linguistics UCLA). The study is restricted to only male speakers. Authors have chosen monosyllabic, disyllabic and polysyllabic Lambada words having monophthongs and diphthongs in order to find out the variations of formant frequency values of each vowel in various positions of a word. Hence, the frequency of first, second and third formants for each vowel were calculated and provided in the explanation of each vowel. The acoustic analysis of some vowels in Lambada language show that the formant values are approximately close to the formant values of English vowels. The analysis was done making use of Praat Software, which has been highly and widely accepted and followed in the field of Phonetics for years.