A Descriptive Study of Pashto Diphthongs
Keywords:
Pashto, Language, Yousafzai, Dialect, Diphthongs, TrapeziumAbstract
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 audio recordings to determine whether the dialect allows diphthongs. The fifteen hours of audio recordings covered various topics over 20 days. During the analysis of the audio recordings, it was found that the Yousafzai dialect allows diphthongs based on the lexical items. Then, the identified words were designed into the minimal set of Pashto diphthongs. The twelve native speakers were asked to pronounce the words of the minimal set to verify the identified diphthongs. Subsequently, the diphthongs were verified by Pashto experts (linguists and teachers). Once all the relevant sources confirmed that the Yousafzai dialect of Pashto has five diphthongs /əɪ/, /aɪ/, /ʊɪ/, /əʊ/, /aʊ/, the story of “The North Wind and Sun” was also recorded by the native speakers as supplementary material which also endorsed the study’s analysis of five diphthongs. The findings of distributional patterns show that all diphthongs occur word-initially, medially, and finally. The study further reveals that three diphthongs, /əɪ/, /ʊɪ/ and /aʊ/, occur in mono-syllabic and bi-syllabic words, while two diphthongs, /aɪ/ and /əʊ/ exist in bi-syllabic and tri-syllabic words. It also exhibits that each diphthong glides from low to high positions as /əɪ/, /aɪ/, /ʊɪ/, /əʊ/, /aʊ/. However, languages like English also allow glides from high positions to a low position, such as /ɪə/, /ʊə/, and/eə/ on the vowel trapezium.
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