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A Socio-Phonetic Investigation of Rhotics in Persian
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
This paper fills in the gap in the literature by providing an acoustic analysis of rhotics in Persian and considers the social variables gender and register. Through the acoustic analysis of 807 tokens, it demonstrates that that there are a number of rhotic variants in Persian in different positions in the word and finds evidence of degemination in coda position, against previous accounts. Furthermore, it suggests that on the one hand, Tehrani-Persian speaking men and women's rhotic production patterns with those of Arabic societies as men favor rhotics with more complex articulations. On the other hand it questions whether the behavior of Tehrani-Persian speaking men and women conforms to established sociolinguistic norms regarding prestige and gender.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Iranian Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 5: On Persian Language and Linguistics , December 2010 , pp. 667 - 682
- Copyright
- Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2010
Footnotes
She acknowledges the generous guidance of her advisor Professor Laura Colantoni and the helpful suggestions of Elham Rohany Rahbar and Natalia Mazzaro.
References
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26 The term vowel assimilation is correctly referred to as “vowel harmony.”
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28 Some would call these fricative trills.
29 Approximants did sound retroflex. However, as there is no general consensus in the literature as to what the acoustic correlates of approximants are, this parameter was not looked into. An articulatory study would also shed light on the issue of retroflection in Persian rhotics.
30 The length contrast was also maintained in minimal pairs such as <kore> “globe” and <korre> “young of certain animals.”
31 Despite what Mahootian (Persian) has proposed, degemination in word final position was not categorical.
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