A cross-varietal continuum of unstressed vowel reduction: evidence from Bulgarian and Turkish

Conference item

We compare speech production data from three Bulgarian and two Turkish varieties with respect to spectral and durational reduction of unstressed nonfront unrounded vowels, and ensuing height neutralisation. Istanbul Turkish lies at one end of a reduction continuum, with only non-neutralising, gradient F1 frequency undershoot that correlates with duration. Monolingual East Bulgarian lies at the opposite end: unstressed, underlyingly non-high vowels raise considerably and merge with their high counterparts. The Bulgarian speech of bilingual Turkish–Bulgarian speakers from the same region of eastern Bulgaria shows less reduction and neutralisation; perhaps surprisingly, it resembles the reduction pattern of West (Standard) Bulgarian, while at the same time also being gradient, probably under the influence of Turkish. The bilinguals’ Turkish speech, on the other hand, exhibits more neutralisation than Istanbul Turkish, but less than their own Bulgarian, which in turn suggests prosodic transfer from these speakers’ Bulgarian to their Turkish.

Authors: Sabev, M; Payne, E

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.
• Host title: Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
• Journal: Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
• Publication date: 2019-08-09
• Acceptance date: 2019-04-01
• Keywords: vowel merger; vowel reduction; incomplete nuetralisation; Bulgarian; Turkish