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Date
2020-02-24
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Royallite Global
Abstract
This paper analyzes the vowel lengths of Ekegusii, a Bantu
language spoken in South-Western Lake Region of Kenya.
Orthographically, the Ekegusii language reveals only five
vowels as a, e, i, o, and u. However, pioneering
researchers like Guthrie (1948) and Whiteley (1965) have
shown that the language has a seven vowel system /a, e,
ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u/. These researches and many later researches
such as Osinde (1988), Bosire (1993), Cammenga (2002),
Nurse and Gerard (2003), and Mecha (2006) among
others relied upon impression to identify and describe the
vowels. Of recent, however, it has become necessary to
use modern scientific acoustic methods of speech analysis
to confirm earlier claims about the vowels in the
language. In this research, we used Praat Software
(Boersma & Weenink 2010) to identify and analyze the
vowel system of Ekegusii. Results indicate that vowel
length is distinctive in the language. Since vowel duration
is
phonemic in the language, then the vowels are
fourteen as each short vowel has a corresponding long
vowel as revealed in the data of this research.
Description
Keywords
citation form, phonemic, running speech, vowel inventory, vowel length