Exploring English Monophthongs’ Formants of Punjabi Speakers in Punjab, Pakistan

Muhammad Sajid-us-Salam; Prof. Dr Mamuna Ghani

Muhammad Sajid-us-Salam PhD Scholar, Department of English, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan
Prof. Dr Mamuna Ghani Dean, Faculty of Arts & Chairperson, Department of English, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan

Keywords: ENGLISH, PUNJABI, MONOPHTHONG, VOWELS, FORMANT, & SPEAKERS

Abstract

This study discovers the formants of Punjabi speakers living in western Punjab, Pakistan and their relative position in a trapezium while articulating English cited words. English is a lingua franca while Punjabi is one of the local languages of India and Pakistan spoken in upper western Punjab, a province of Pakistan and Eastern Punjab, a part of India. The F1 and F2 (Formant 1 & Formant 2) determine the position of a monophthong (vowel) in a trapezium. Data were collected from twenty (20) Male participants from Lahore and Faisalabad, two major cities of Pakistan and were asked to articulate one hundred and twenty English cited words carrying all English monophthongs. The data was analyzed by measuring the Formant values (F1 and F2) of every single word articulated by twenty (20) Punjabi Male speakers. The Values in Hertz were changed into Bark Scale and Euclidian method was used to measure the distance of monophthongs articulated by Male participants living in Lahore and Faisalabad to determine the difference between two dialects of Punjabi language. Both the groups were also compared through co-relative t-test. The results showed that t value is 0.58, df=11 and P>0.955 which is much higher than 0.05, so it can be concluded that these two cities' speakers utter the English cited words in the same way.