TONAL ANALYSIS OF MANKIYALI: AN ACOUSTIC STUDY

Abstract

Mankiyali is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in remote hilly areas by a small community in northern Pakistan. It is an undocumented language and is in immediate need of research from a linguistic viewpoint. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the tone of Mankiyali. For that to achieve, an audio file was generated that contained various utterances of the native speakers. The file contained three sets which were recorded from three speakers. Each set had three words that carried different meanings in the given three sets. The set list was distributed among the selected participants, who were instructed to utter these words ata natural-normal speed rate. They first uttered the words with meaning and then without meaning. The utterances of all three speakers
were recorded usinga high-quality ZoomH6 recorder and saved ona laptop. To obtain the intended objectives of the study, the recorded data were analysed through Praat. There were three data sets; only one speaker was randomly selected for a single set, and the collected utterances were then analysed. Similarly, another speaker was chosen for another set, and so on. The results were obtained through acoustics analysis using Praat, and the spectrograms were taken of every word with various pitches, respectively. The results revealed that there were rising, falling, rising-falling tones in the utterances of the native speakers. Thus, it was concluded that Mankiyali has a threeway contrastive and lexical contour tone.