Title

Acoustic Analysis of Central Vowels of Pakistani English

Hafiz Ahmad Bilal
Lecturer, Department of English
University of Sargodha, Sargodha
Pakistan+92-321-6002709; escholer@gmail.com

Abstract
It is observed that Pakistani English (PE) is a different variety of English with its different
linguistic systems due to its contact with local languages (Baumgardner, 1993; Baumgardner,Kennedy, & Shamim, 1993; Kennedy, 1993; Tallat, 1993, 2002, 2003). PE is an emerging
variety of the greater family of Asian Englishes. The current study investigates the acousticfeatures of central vowels of PE with the question in focus whether they are realised as different
phonemes or they have lost their identity like other Asian Englishes that tend to turn the reduced
vowels into a full vowel or merge the central vowels i.e. /ə/, /¥:/ and /Λ/ (Sailaja, 2009;Deterding, 2007; Bautista & Gonzalez, 2006; Gargesh, 2006; Kachru, 2005). Praat was used forthe analysis and measurement of the formant values. 60 subjects (30 male and 30 female) wereselected from among the working-professionals including teachers, doctors and lawyers fromSargodha with Punjabi as their L1. Isolated words were recorded using a career phrase. It wasconcluded that reduced vowels were absent in Pakistani English and that PE has one central
vowel and that, too, a full vowel.

Key words: praat, acoustic analysis, central vowels, formants, Asian Englishes, Pakistani
EnglishReferences
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Brief Biography:
Hafiz Ahmad Bilal is servicing as lecturer at Department of English, University of Sargodha. He
is teaching Phonetics and Phonology, Discourse Analysis and ESP. He did his MPhil in Applied
Linguistics in 2011 from GC University Faisalabad. His specialisation is in Acoustic Phonetics.
His research is on acoustic features of Pakistani English, which is considered an emerging
variety of Asian Englishes. He has presented a research paper regarding Pakistani English at 17th
Annual Conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE) at Monash
University, Melbourne, Australia in 2011. A few of his research articles are also published on thesame issue.