The acoustic characteristics of diphthongs in Indian English

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an acoustic analysis of English diphthongs produced by three L1 speakers of Hindi and four L1 speakers of Punjabi. Formant trajectories of rising and falling diphthongs (i.e., vowels where there is a clear rising or falling trajectory through the F1/F2 vowel space) were analysed in a corpus of citation-form words. In line with previous research, the diphthong inventory included six different diphthongs and a long monophthongal vowel [OI] in place of/partial derivative U/in GOAT; however, none of the speakers produced a full set of diphthong vowels. In addition, the/eI/diphthong, as in FACE, and the/U partial derivative/diphthong, as in TOUR, had both monoph..