ACOUSTIC ANALYSIS OF PHONEMES OF KHOWAR LANGUAGE

Abstract

Khowar, the lingua franca of people living in district Chitral, is a rich language from linguistic perspective, possessing links with Old Indo-Aryan (OIA) languages in its inventory and lexical similarity with Sanskrit language. The aim of the current study is to redefine and document its phonemic inventory with the possible, latest and authentic linguistic tools. Phonemic inventory of language is core to observe languages with linguistic criterion, especially phonemic inventory of languages that are indigenous and geographically isolated, because they have been linguistically less observed. Khowar language been archaic in nature has a large phonemic inventory needs an acoustic investigation of phonemes for their better understanding. The current study focused on the status of existing phonemes both consonants and vowels and their acoustic characteristics and explored undocumented segments in the inventory of Khowar language. The findings of this study will benefit both native speakers and educational institutions with their Khowar language script and will provide easy way for researchers interested. The current descriptive study followed the both qualitative and quantitative scales, with segment acoustic description, explanation and charting formant values. The data has been collected in the form of recording from speakers of Khowar language studying in Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad for segments included in reading list proposed by the researcher. The recorded corpus has been analyzed using Praat (2017). The research outcomes are updated and acoustically redefined phonemic inventory of Khowar Language.