A Phonetic Analysis of Hindko Affricate Sounds

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze the affricate sounds of Hindko dialect spoken in Tanawal, Mansehra, Pakistan. The data were taken from the 12 native speakers, and measured in light of articulatory and acoustic phonetics. The articulatory analysis was taken into account to find out the places of articulation and word distributional occurrences. However, for the acoustic analysis, a list of the affricates was developed in vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) context, e.g. /a?a/, /a?a/, /a?^ha/, and recorded from the native speakers. The data were examined both spectrographically and statistically in the computer software, ‘PRAAT’. The spectrographic analysis was carried out to examine extrinsic properties of the affricates and the statistical measurement was taken into account to find out the silent gap duration, noise frication duration and overall duration of the three consonants. It was found that Hindko has three affricate sounds, unapirated, voiced and aspirated. They are articulated from the palatal place of articulation and these sounds freely occur word initially, medially and finally. Since the affricates are the combination of stops /t, d/ and fricatives /?, ?/, and like the previous studies on affricates, the present study also shows that individual stop and fricative sounds have longer duration than affricates.