Endangered languages are in need of urgent documentation. Following the phonetic tradition of Ladefoged and Maddieson, this chapter reports results of the first phonetic instrumental analysis of stress in Southern Ute, a severely endangered Uto-Aztecan language. The phonetic correlates of stress could include changes in duration, pitch and/or intensity (Ladefoged 2006). This analysis is based on a list of 100 words designed to determine the phonetic correlates of stress. Five speakers (three female and two male) were recorded using a frame sentence to control intonation. Stress placement data was elicited from one male and one female speaker. This prosodic information forms the basis of revitalization and documentation efforts as well as further phonological investigation.

In this article, we analyze the phonetic realizations of devoiced vowels from 8 fluent speakers of Southern Ute, a severely endangered Southern Numic Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Southwestern Colorado. Devoiced vowels are considered to be an important aspect of the phonology of Southern Ute, yet very little is known about the pronunciation of such segments. Our findings indicate that devoiced vowels are realized phonetically in three ways: (i) fully voiceless, (ii) partially devoiced, and (iii) fully reduced with concurrent lengthening, lower intensity and greater voicelessness of the preceding consonant. Such variable and noncategorical devoicing is seen for both high and nonhigh vowels and all consonants regardless of their manner of articulation.

This paper presents an acoustic study of the vowel system of Southern Ute, a Southern Numic Uto-Aztecan language spoken in southwestern Colorado. Previous auditory accounts proposed an inventory of five vowel phonemes that participate in three allophonic processes and contrast in length and stress. We investigate how the vowels are realized at the phonetic level by analyzing F1, F2, duration, spectral emphasis and f0 in over 6000 vowel tokens produced by eight fluent speakers (four female and four male). Our findings provide new phonetic detail for the earlier non-instrumental descriptions of the language, including both expected and previously unreported effects. We confirm the existence of five distinct phonemic categories but show that their prototypical phonetic realizations and positional allophones do not always match the earlier descriptions. We also describe how phonemic length and stress are marked in Southern Ute.

Most of the Native American languages are severely endangered and lack detailed phonetic descriptions. Our research aims to document the sound system of Southern Ute, a Numic language of the Ute-Aztecan family spoken by approximately 40 elders in southwestern Colorado, for which only basic impressionistic descriptions are available in the published grammar of the language (Givon, 1980). In this acoustic study, we focus on Southern Ute vowels. We analyze over 6,000 vowel tokens produced by 8 fluent speakers and present our findings on a variety of vocalic processes in Southern Ute, including positional allophony, vowel harmony, as well as phonetic aspects of lexical stress and durational differences related to the phonological length distinction.