The Black Kenyan English vowel system

An acoustic phonetic analysis

Bibliographic Data

ID11308693
AuthorsThomas Hoffmann (0000-0002-8435-5188, Osnabrück University, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume32
Issue2
Pages147-173
Publication date2011-07-13
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnglish World-Wide A Journal of Varieties of English (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0172-8865 • E-ISSN: 1569-9730
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/eww.32.2.02hof
OpenAlexW1983271971
LanguageEN
Citations received7

While acoustic phonetic studies have been carried out on all types of Englishes around the world, the second language variety spoken in Kenya has so far not been investigated acoustically. The present paper closes this gap by presenting an acoustic phonetic analysis of acrolectal Kenyan English. The data presented here consist of nine male speakers of acrolectal Kenyan English reading the “The North Wind and the Sun”-passage and were analysed using PRAAT (Boersma 2001; Boersma and Weenink 2008). As I will show, a careful visual and statistical analysis of the data unearthes several features of the Kenyan English vowel system that so far have gone unnoticed (e.g. a trend towards a seven vowel system with two front and two back mid vowels). Furthermore I will argue that some of these features can be traced back to the local L1 feature pool

Kenya · Linguistics · Political science · Vowel · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Artificial Intelligence

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