ACOUSTIC BEHAVIOR OF ENGLISH TRIPHTHONGS IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH VARIETY

Abstract

In this research, the acoustic behavior of English triphthongs has been analyzed in Pakistani English (PakE) variety. A triphthong is a gliding movement of three consecutive vowels. According to Roach (2009), majority of English speakers (with BBC pronunciation) perceived few words as monosyllabic vocabulary by identifying triphthongs. English has five triphthongs which are comprised with the combination of closing diphthongs followed by a short vowel schwa (ə). Contrarily, this condition may not compulsory for PakE due to the language variation phenomenon as we know that two diverse languages have different approaches. If there are some similarities in them than consider them just coincidence nothing else. Presently, it has been proposed that the native language, Urdu affects the acoustic behavior of English triphthongs therefore, two different experimental approaches are adopted. In the first step, the auditory approach has used syllable count technique. While in the second step, the identified segments have been acoustically analyzed in PRAAT. After data analysis, the results have reported that Urdu has influenced and transformed the acoustic features of PakE. Therefore, there is no trace of English triphthongs in PakE variety and they are replaced with a monophthong, diphthong or syllabic division.