Abstract
African languages are well endowed with fricatives. Common ones /f, v, s, z, ʒ, ʃ, h /, less common ones /β, ɸ, s’, ç, ɣ, χ, ɦ/, and rare ones /ʃw, ɕ, ɕw , zɥ/ are all found in West African languages (Ladefoged 1968:45-66). Yet, surprisingly, there is a severe paucity of data on the acoustic phonetic properties of fricatives in these languages. This paper seeks to remedy this situation by providing a comprehensive overview of voiceless fricatives in Anyi, an Akan language spoken in Côte d’Ivoire. Twelve correlates, i.e., F0, F1, F2, F3, F4, Center of Gravity, intensity, duration, and bandwidths (B1, B2, B3, B4) are extracted from /f/ and /s/ when they occur before /i, ɪ, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, ʊ, u/. The findings to be discussed are based on 5,436 tokens, that is, three repetitions of /f/ and /s/ produced by nine native speakers of Anyi, across 12 correlates. The paper helps to answer questions about the putative role of these correlates in speech intelligibility in Anyi and possibly other Akan languages.
Recommended Citation
Koffi, Ettien
(2024)
"THE ACOUSTIC PHONETIC PROPERTIES OF VOICELESS FRICATIVES IN ANYI,"
Linguistic Portfolios: Vol. 13, Article 7.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling/vol13/iss1/7
