Vowels in the Barunga Variety of North Australian Kriol

Abstract

North Australian Kriol is an English based creole spoken widely by Indigenous people in northern Australia in areas where the traditional languages are endangered or no longer spoken. This paper offers the first acoustic description of the vowel phonology of Roper Kriol, within a variety spoken at Barunga Community, east of the town of Katherine in the Northern Territory. Drawing on a new corpus for Barunga Kriol, the paper presents analyses of the short and long monophthongs, as well as the diphthongs in the spontaneous speech of young adults. The results show the durations and spectral characteristics of the vowels, including major patterns of allophony (i.e. coarticulation and context effects). This updates the phonology over the previous description from the 1970s, showing that there is an additional front low vowel phoneme in the speech of young people today, as well as a vowel length contrast. Interestingly there are points of similarity with the vowel acoustics for traditional Aboriginal languages of the region, for example in a relatively compact vowel space and in the modest trajectories of diphthongs.

Computational sociophonetics using automatic speech recognition

“…An example of this would be using English ARPABET to transcribe words from Mixtec, and then treating the Mixtec words as new English words, which would be handled by a pre‐existing English acoustic model (DiCanio et al., 2013). This technique has been used to align data from languages like Swedish (Young & McGarrah, 2021); Tongan (Johnson et al., 2018), Chatino (Ćavar et al., 2016) and Triqui (Hatcher & DiCanio, 2019) from Mexico, Bribri (Coto‐Solano & Flores‐Solórzano, 2017), Malecu and Cabécar from Costa Rica (Coto‐Solano & Flores‐Solórzano, 2016); Nikyob from Nigeria (Kempton, 2017), Matukar Panau from Papua New Guinea (Barth et al., 2020); Yidiny from Australia (Babinsky et al., 2019); and North Australian Kriol (Jones et al., 2017).…”

Comparing the performance of forced aligners used in sociophonetic research

“…There are pre-trained models available for several languages, including English, German and Icelandic, as well as a pan-Australian model for Aboriginal languages (cf., Stoakes and Schiel 2017). MAUS can also be adapted to work with languages lacking pretrained acoustic models, as has been done, for example, for Barunga Kriol (a variety of an English-based creole spoken in Roper River, North Australia, Jones et al 2017) and Bora (a Witotoan language spoken in Peru, Strunk et al 2014). For the Australian English model, MAUS has been pre-trained on a subset of the AusTalk database (Wagner et al 2010), comprised of word lists and read sentences from 95 speakers.…”