PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This is the first analysis of vowel quality in spontaneous Punjabi English (PunE) spoken by Punjabi native speakers from Pakistan. Many analyses of indigenized Englishes often ignore the fact that a multilingual community may have multiple varieties of English. Moreover, they mostly offer exocentric comparisons between native and non-native varieties. For example, the existing studies on Pakistani English (PakE) offer comparisons with either American English (Abbasi et al., 2018) or British English (Bilal et al., 2021; Mahboob & Ahmar, 2008), thus failing to capture the influence of the linguistic diversity in Pakistan. We offer an endocentric analysis here and compare the inventory and quality of vowels in PunE compared with Pakistani Punjabi, two under-studied languages. The data consisted of a subset of interviews conducted with native speakers of Punjabi. We analyzed Bark-normalized F1 and F2 in PunE and Punjabi vowels (N = 1,759) produced by two female speakers. Our analysis showed that PunE and Punjabi shared ten vowels (Front: i, ɪ, ɛ, e, a; Back: ʊ, u, o, ɔ; Central: ə). Notwithstanding the shared vowels, their quality differed significantly between PunE and Punjabi for three front vowels [i, ɛ, e], two back vowels [u, o], and for [ə]. Linear Mixed-Effects Regression analysis showed significant interaction between language (PunE, Punjabi) and F1 of the shared vowels (p < 0.0001) as well as the F2 of these vowels (p < 0.0001). This indicates a difference in the space of vowels shared between PunE and Punjabi. Further analysis showed that compared with Punjabi, [i, e] were produced with more fronted quality in PunE (i: p < 0.001; e: p = 0.0002). [ɛ] was produced as more open (p = 0.0002) and less fronted (p = 0.009) in PunE. Both [u, o] were produced with less open quality in PunE than Punjabi (u: p = 0.0004; o: p = 0.04). [ə] in PunE was produced with less open (p < 0.0001) and more fronted quality (p < 0.0001). No significant difference was found between the remaining vowels. Our results indicate that the vowel inventory in PunE is influenced by Punjabi. However, the vowels in these two languages differ in their acoustic phonetic properties and exhibit a differential use of vowel space. Therefore, we propose that Punjabi English is a distinct variety of English and is insufficiently described by the global term Pakistani English. Future research with more speakers can shed further light on these differences.