Acoustic analysis of vowels in Konkani

Abstract

Konkani is an under-resourced language mainly spoken on the west coast of India. Although linguistic analyses of vowel sounds in various dialects of Konkani have been done in the past, more accurate analysis of Konkani vowels, especially an acoustic-phonetic analysis, was never carried out. In this article, we present a detailed analysis of nine Konkani vowels, namely /i/, /e/, /ε/, /u/, /o/, /ɔ/, /a/, /ə/, and /ɨ̞/. The dataset used for the analysis was created from audio recordings of 28 native speakers of Goan Konkani. Based on the experimental results, we propose a vowel chart for Konkani. We also observed a partial loss of Konkani vowel /ɨ̞/ in the regular speech of native speakers. This change is also evident in the substitution analysis of vowel phonemes that was carried out by us as a part of this study.