North Australian Kriol is an English based creole spoken widely by
Indigenous people in northern Australia in areas where the traditional
languages are endangered or no longer spoken. This paper offers the
first acoustic description of the vowel phonology of Roper Kriol, within
a variety spoken at Barunga Community, east of the town of Katherine
in the Northern Territory.
Drawing on a new corpus
for Barunga Kriol, the paper presents analyses of the short and long
monophthongs, as well as the diphthongs in the spontaneous speech of
young adults. The results show the durations and spectral characteristics
of the vowels, including major patterns of allophony (i.e. coarticulation
and context effects). This updates the phonology over the previous
description from the 1970s, showing that there is an additional front
low vowel phoneme in the speech of young people today, as well as a
vowel length contrast. Interestingly there are points of similarity
with the vowel acoustics for traditional Aboriginal languages of the
region, for example in a relatively compact vowel space and in the
modest trajectories of diphthongs.
Cite as: Jones, C., Demuth, K., Li, W., Almeida, A. (2017) Vowels in the Barunga Variety of North Australian Kriol. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 219-223, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1552
@inproceedings{jones17_interspeech,
author={Caroline Jones and Katherine Demuth and Weicong Li and Andre Almeida},
title={{Vowels in the Barunga Variety of North Australian Kriol}},
year=2017,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2017},
pages={219--223},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2017-1552}
}