Monophthongs of PakE: An acoustic investigation

Abstract

Pakistan falls into the outer-circle countries where English is used as second language. The indigenization
process has caused much variation in spoken as well as written English. It is observed that a new variety of non-native
Englishes is in the making, i.e. Pakistani English (PakE). The current study looks into this observation through acoustic
analysis of the vowels of PakE, to determine whether PakE can be claimed as an indigenous variety of Asian Englishes
on the basis of its monophthongs. The study examined the monophthongs of PakE. For the analysis, 30 participants (15
male and 15 female) were chosen from among the students of MPhil English University of Sargodha Pakistan, who were
working on their dissertations after completing their course work. It was also considered that all of them were aged
from 22 to 26, were using Urdu as their mother tongue, and were exposed to English since their primary schooling.
Monosyllabic words with /hVd/ context were selected and recorded using a carrier phrase in a noise free environment
with the help of hi-tech equipment. For the measurement of formants, i.e. F1 and F2, and the durational properties,
PRAAT was used. Tukey’s HSD Test was also performed to examine whether the values of formants are significantly
different. The results proved that PakE has nine pure vowels (unlike SBE which has twelve). On the basis of the results,
the conclusions were drawn that PakE is a different variety of non-native English with its distinct set of vowel phonemes.