A Descriptive Study of Pashto Diphthongs
Keywords:
Pashto, Yousafzai dialect, Diphthongs, Oral corpus.Abstract
This paper investigates the Pashto diphthongs of the Yousafzai dialect spoken in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. It is the standard dialect of Pashto, widely spoken in the province. The data were collected from the native speakers in the form of audio recordings to find out whether the dialect allows diphthongs or not. The speakers’ discussions on various topics were recorded for fifteen hours over twenty days. After listening to the recordings, it was found that the Yousafzai dialect allows diphthongs. The findings revealed that all the diphthongs were based on lexical items. Based on the diphthong words, the minimal set was designed. Then the minimal set of diphthong words was articulated by twelve native speakers for further verification. Subsequently, the data were investigated by the experts of Pashto (linguists and teachers). Moreover, the story of “The North Wind and Sun” was also recorded by the native speakers as supplementary material to confirm the diphthongs of the language. It was found that the Yousafzai dialect of Pashto has five diphthongs: /əɪ/, /aɪ/, /ʊɪ/, /əʊ/, /aʊ/. The distributional patterns show that all diphthongs occur word-initially, medially, and finally.
References
Bashir, E. L. (1991). A Contrastive Analysis of Pashto and Urdu. Academy for Educational Development.
Bell, A., & Saka, M. M. (1983). Reversed sonority in Pashto initial clusters. Journal of Phonetics, 11(3), 259-275.
Davenport, M., & Hannahs, S. J. (2020). Introducing phonetics and phonology. Routledge.
Din, R. & Rahman, G. (2011). The acoustic analysis of Pashto vowels, 11, 793-797.
Hallberg, G. D. (1992). Sociolinguistic survey of Northern Pakistan volume 4 Pashto, Waneci, Ormuri. Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quid-i-Azam University.
Khan, M. K. & Bukhari, N. H. (2012). SVO word order in Pashto: An optimality theoretic analysis. Kashmir Journal of Language Research, 15(1), 59-80.
Khan, M.K. & Bukhari. N.H. (2012). A comparative analysis of consonant cluster in English and Pashto. Kashmir Journal of Language Research, 15 (2), 1-18.
Ladefoged, P. & Johnson, K. (2006). A course in Phonetics. Michael Rosenberg.
Meyer, C. F. (2009). Introducing English linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Miran, M. A. (1969). Major problems of Dari speakers in mastering Pashto morphology. Master Thesis. The University of Texas at Austin.
Odden, D. (2005). Introducing phonology. Cambridge University Press.
Penzl, H. (1954). Orthography and phonemes in Pashto (Afghan). Journal of the American Oriental Society, 74, (2) 74-81.
Penzl, H. (1961). Western loanwords in modern Pashto. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 81 (1), 43-52.
Rehman, G., Khan, A. Q., & Bukhari, N. H. (2012). English problematic consonants for Pashto speakers. Academic Research International, 2(1), 695.
Raverty, C. (Ed.) (1859). Pukhto, Pushto of the language of the Afghan. Lahor Sang-e-Meel Publications.
Roach, P. (1991). English Phonetics and Phonology. Cambridge University Press.
Shierani, H. A. (2009). APPL: Building bilingual Anglo-Pashto proper noun lexian from Web. Department of Computer Science. University of Sheffield.
Tegey, H. & Robson, B. (1996). A reference grammar of Pashto. Washington.
Yule, G. (2010). The study of language. Cambridge University Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Shakir Ullah, Muhammad Nawaz, Muhammad Kamal Khan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
