Acoustic Characteristics of Three Vowels of Standard Sri Lankan English

The phonology of Standard Sri Lankan English (SSLE) reflects a strong influence from the vernaculars of Sri Lanka Sinhala and Tamil. This results in deviations from the donor colonial Standard British English pronunciation. This study provides measurements of formant frequencies in synchronically recorded sound data for six selected vowels, short and long monophthongs of SSLE. Evidence is compiled through formant readings of acoustic documentation from elicitations of ten female bilingual subjects. Of the ten bilingual subjects five have Sinhala and the rest Tamil as their first language while SSLE is their second language. Formant contours are compared to parallel data in literature. Discriminant analysis showed that these SSLE vowels differ in terms of average frequencies of formants from Standard Southern British English and American English equivalents.