Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T07:25:26.305Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Socio-Phonetic Investigation of Rhotics in Persian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Yasaman Rafat
Yasaman Rafat*
Affiliation:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Torontoyasaman.rafat@utoronto.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

She acknowledges the generous guidance of her advisor Professor Laura Colantoni and the helpful suggestions of Elham Rohany Rahbar and Natalia Mazzaro.

References

1 Beatriz Blecua, “Caracterización Acustica De Las Vibrantes del Español En Posición Intervocálica” (Master's thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 2001); Laura Colantoni, “Mergers, Chain Shifts, and Dissimilatory Processes: Palatals and Rhotics in Argentine Spanish” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2001); Rissel, Dorothy, “Sex, Attitudes and the Assibilation of /r/ Among Young People in San Luis de Potosi, Mexico,” Language Variation and Change, 1 (1989): 269–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Sankoff, Gillian and Blondeau, Helen, “Language Change across the Lifespan: /r/ in Montreal French,” Language, 83, no. 3 (2007): 560–588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Robert E. Hagiwara, “Acoustic Realizations of American /r/ as Produced by Women and Men (PhD diss., University of California, 1996)

4 Ladefoged, Peter and Maddieson, Ian, The Sounds of the World's Languages (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1996), 214.Google Scholar

5 Ladefoged and Maddieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages, 226.

6 Ladefoged and Maddieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages, 231.

7 Ladefoged and Maddieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages, 232.

8 Ladefoged and Maddieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages, 245.

9 Solé, Maria-Josep, “Aerodynamic Characteristics of Trills and Phonological Patterning,” Journal of Phonetics, 30 (2002): 655–688.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Tomás, Tomás Navarro, Manual De Pronunciación Española (Madrid, 1972), 118.Google Scholar

11 Blecua, “Caracterización Acustica,” 205.

12 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (Cambridge, 1999).Google Scholar

13 Ladeoged and Maddieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages, 216.

14 Susan B. Inouye, “Trills, Taps and Stops in Variation and Contrast” (PhD diss., University of California, 1995).

15 Samareh, Yadollah, The Phonetics of Persian Language (Tehran, 1985), 67.Google Scholar

16 Samareh, The Phonetics of Persian Language, 69. Samareh describes the intervocalic geminate rhotics as two consequent rhotics: the first one without a release and the second one without an onset. It is not clear whether he is referring to two consequent trills or other type of rhotics, given the phonetic symbols that he has used.

17 Mahootian, Shahrzad, Persian (London, 1997), 309.Google Scholar

18 Hansen, Benjamin B., “Persian Geminates: Effects of Varying Speaking Rates,” in Proceedings of the 2003 Texas Linguistics Society Conference: Coarticulation in Speech Production and Perception, ed. Agweuele, Augustine, Warren, Willis and Park, San-Hoon, 86–95 (Somerville, MA, 2004).Google Scholar

19 Chambers, J. K., ed., Sociolinguistic Theory (Malden, MA, 1995), 162.Google Scholar

20 Labov, William, The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Washington, DC, 1966), 288.Google Scholar

21 Chambers, Sociolinguistic Theory, 156.

22 Muhammad H. Ibrahim, “Standard and Prestige Language: A Problem in Arabic Sociolinguistics,” in Chambers, ed., Sociolinguistic Theory, 161.

23 Al, Feda Y.-Tamimi, “To Use [□] Is Prestigious,” Linguistische Berichte, 208 (November 2006): 439–454.Google Scholar

24 Yahya Modaressi-Tehrani, “A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Modern Persian,” in Chambers, ed., Sociolinguistic Theory, 156.

25 Jahangiri, Nader, “A Sociolinguistic Study of Persian in Tehran,” in An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, ed. by Wardhaugh, Ronald (Malden, MA, 1998), 175–176Google Scholar.

26 The term vowel assimilation is correctly referred to as “vowel harmony.”

27 An articulatory study is needed to distinguish between taps and flaps in Persian.

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.

32 See Ohala, John and Kawasaki, Haruko, “Prosodic Phonology and Phonetics,” Phonology Yearbook, 1 (1984): 113–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 I am not suggesting that the difference between Tehrani Persian in the reading style and the vernacular Tehrani Persian is anywhere as close to the difference between literary and vernacular Arabic. However, the difference is larger than the reading style and the vernacular in English. In my opinion, some of the other differences include the rate of the application of vowel harmony and the pronunciation of vowels prior to word final /m/ or /n/.