See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/259424726

Assamese

Article  in  Journal of the International Phonetic Association · August 2012

DOI: 10.1017/S0025100312000096

CITATIONS READS
3 6,462

1 author:

Shakuntala Mahanta
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
35 PUBLICATIONS   62 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Sylheti View project

learning vowel harmony View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Shakuntala Mahanta on 13 September 2017.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 1

Dr. Shakuntala Mahanta

Assistant Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
North Guwahati, Assam, INDIA
PIN -781039

Phone:
91 361 2582565 (o) 91 361 2584565 (r)

Fax:
91 361 2582599

Email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
 2

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE IPA

Assamese
Shakuntala Mahanta
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
[email protected]

The variety described here is representative of colloquial Assamesei spoken in the

eastern districts of Assam. Assam is a north-eastern state of India, therefore Assamese

and creoles of Assamese like Nagamese are spoken in the different north-eastern states

of Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, and also the neighbouring country of

Bhutan. Approximately 15 million people speak Assamese in India (see Ethnologue,

Gordon 2005, which lists 15,374,000 speakers including those in Bhutan and

Bangladesh). In the pre-British era (until 1826), the kingdom of Assam was ruled by

Ahom kings and the then capital was based in the eastern district of Sibsagar and later

in Jorhat. American missionaries established the first printing press in Sibsagar and in

the year 1846 published a monthly periodical ‘Arunodoi’ using the variety spoken in

and around Sibsagar as the point of departure. This is the immediate reason which led

to the acceptance of the formal variety spoken in eastern Assam, (which roughly

comprises of all the districts of Upper Assam). Having said that, the language spoken in

these regions of Assam also show a certain degree of variation from the written form of

the ‘standard’ language. As against the relative homogeneity of the variety spoken in

eastern Assam, variation is considerable in certain other districts which would

constitute the western part of Assam, comprising of the district of Kamrup up to

Goalpara and Dhubri (see also Kakati 1962 and Grierson 1968). In contemporary

Assam, for the purposes of mass media and communication, a certain neutral blend of
 3

eastern Assamese, without too many distinctive eastern features, like / / deletion, which

is a robust phenomenon in the eastern varieties, is still considered to be the norm. The

lexis of Assamese is mainly Indo-Aryan, but it also has a sizeable amount of lexical

items related to Bodo among other Tibeto-Burman languages (Kakati 1962), and there

are a substantial number of items borrowed from Hindi, English and Bengali in recent

times.

The speaker of this passage is a 27-year-old female teacher in a prestigious middle

school. Apart from her teaching activities she also speaks in public gatherings and other

social events. She grew up in Jorhat and has lived there all her life.

Consonants

The following twenty consonants belong to the consonant inventory of the Assamese

speakers represented by the speaker of the Assamese passage:

Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal

Plosive p b t d k g
p b t d k g
Nasal m n
Fricative s z x h
Approximant j w
Lateral l
approximant

Consonant Transcription Orthography Gloss

p ‘to rear’
p ‘to split’
b ‘male child’
b ‘good’
t ‘Palmyra tree
t ‘plate’
d ‘branch’
d ‘shield’
 4

k ‘time’
k ‘ditch’
g ‘cheek
g ‘stroke’
‘Hindu God Rama’
l ‘red’
s ‘roof of a house’
z ‘net’
x ‘loom’
h ‘hand’
m ‘goods’
n ‘handle’
‘grape’
‘girl’
‘here’

Syllable-final plosives are unreleased. Syllable-initial and syllable-final

, and are denti-alveolar or apico-alveolar depending on the preceding or

following vowel. For instance, in ‘down’ LOCATIVE, both the initial as well as

the final are alveolar. While these segments are distinctly denti-alveolar in the

presence of vowels which are high and front, for instance in a word like ‘wet’

CONJUNCTIVE PARTICIPIAL they are definitely apico-alveolar when either the preceding

or the following vowel is a back vowel.

In the production of / /, very often a released in the initial syllable onset

position is noticed, as in instead of ‘wind’. Although aspiration is

distinctive in all positions, there is considerable amount of de-aspiration in certain

positions. Voiced aspirates in non-initial positions tend to lose their quality of

breathiness. For instance, > ‘tiger’, > ‘profit’, and >

 5

‘desire/wish’. Among the voiceless aspirates, a distinguishing characteristic in

the phonetics of Assamese is that of spirantisation, which is not observed for /p / and

/t /, but /k / undergoes spirantisation to the extent that [x] and [ ] are frequently

realised as allophones of /k /. Depending on the individual speaker and on the degree of

carefulness of speech (fast speech/slow speech or formal speech/informal speech), /k /

can be pronounced anywhere from to or [x]. > > ‘milk’,

> > ‘a letter of the alphabet’.

Although the writing system of Assameseii maintains a token retroflex vs. dental

distinction, neither of the two place features form a part of the consonantal system.

Therefore, it appears that obstruents have neutralized their dental vs. retroflex

distinctions to become very distinctly alveolar (since the distinction is present in all the

related languages and also preserved in the orthography, I assume that the distinction

was historically present in Assamese, a contention which is, nonetheless, debatable).

All the consonant phonemes, except the velar nasal / / and the semi-vowels /j/ and

/w/, contrast initially, medially and finally. / / in Assamese occurs independently of

homorganic consonants but does not appear in word-initial positions.

Affricates are also not present as distinctive sound units. However [ occurs as

an allophone of /z/ in some speakers, mostly in syllable-initial and therefore prominent

positions. Voice Onset Time is delayed in the phonetic realisation of /z/. In non-

prominent positions the delay in the onset of voicing is considerable and it can sound

like an [s]. This tendency can also occasionally result in word-final devoicing.
 6

However, speakers can easily differentiate between a devoiced and a and

are both laminal.

An allophonic palatalisation when is followed by as in ! ‘sun’

[d oizz! ‘patience’ [b izz!ik] ‘superficial’ is also observed in Assamese. In the

careful speech of speakers with a higher degree of formal education, lexical items may

be pronounced in a way which reflect the corresponding orthographic convention, as in

! #" [xui dzj ‘sun’

Standard Assamese has been reported to attest consonant gemination (Moral 1996).

The following examples have been taken from Moral 1996:

/s ‘fifty six’
‘twenty six’
‘answer’
‘disgust’
" ‘nineteen’

Moral also reports degemination in the Central Assamese dialects spoken in the

contiguous districts of Morigaon, Nagaon and Sonitpur. Degemination may be a

lexically determined process in the variety discussed here.

The only rhotic is limited in the number of its allophones. Like English, when

precedes a consonant, it is normally an alveolar approximant, but it can also undergo

deletion in all positions except the initial position. In non-initial positions, / / is subject

to optional deletion, giving way to phonetic lengthening in the place of the deleted

segment, e.g. # $ ‘our’.

 7

Sometimes, consonants apparently not native to Assamese but used in loan words

from English and Hindi also surface, like % and & among others, in words such as fan

and shwal. This is also optional and borrowed words may assimilate to the native

system in such a way that fan and shwal may be realized as ' and [s l]

respectively. and also ( are used exclusively in loan words from English and

Hindi and do not belong to the ‘native’ sound system of Assamese. ) is a Sanskrit

remnant and occurs only in a select few words in the careful speech of educated people.

For instance ‘read’ can also be realized as .

Vowels

Assamese has eight oral vowels

i u

e o
'

Vowel Transcription Orthography Gloss

$ ‘a lake’
* * $ ‘sun’iii
proper name
‘colour’
" " ‘let’s go’
' ' ‘stupid person’
‘big’
‘male child

The plot of the vowels in the diagram above shows that front vowels are more spread

out, allowing for significant height differences between /i/, /e/ and /'/. /e/ has a mid
 8

central allophone used in many contexts, especially after the occurrence of /i/, and is

somewhat lower than a prototypical [e].

Among the back vowels, while / / is the lowest, /o/ is higher than / / / is only

slightly lower than /u/. The quality of the [ ] may vary depending on the context, but is

mostly pronounced in the mid position, and it assimilates to the back quality of

neighbouring consonants in the environment, and it may be realized further back after

the velar consonants.

The occurrences of [e] and [o] are constrained by the process of vowel harmony.

They mostly appear only when /i/ and /u/ occur in the following syllable. However [e]

and [o] appear in borrowed items from English, Hindi, and those which have been

directly incorporated from Sanskrit. All the other vowels except [e] and [o] may occur

word-initially, medially, or finally.

Though there are no phonemic length distinctions, the vowels are long in open

syllables and shorter in closed syllables.

The list of Assamese vowel phonemes also includes a vowel has been the subject of

attention in phonetic studies in the recent past (Ladefoged 1986, 2001, 2003). In my

analysis, this vowel is shown to be / but in Ladefoged’s work(s) this vowel has been

shown to represent / /+, a low back vowel which has the tongue position of [ ] and the

rounding of [ ]. Contrary to the investigation by Ladefoged, the vowel in the repertoire

of the speaker of this experiment shows the qualities of height and roundedness (also

noted by Ladefoged), and therefore represented as [ ], a vowel which alternates to /u/

under vowel harmony. Note that the occurrences of /e/ and /o/ in the examples used for

Ladefoged’s experiment is only due to the presence of the following high vowels /i/ and
 9

/u/, but this property is not discussed or observed in his work. Furthermore, in

Ladefoged’s examples the ‘rounded low vowel’ in the verbal root [p t+] ‘to bury’ leads

to the derivation of a high round vowel in /puti/ ‘having buried’. Nonetheless, it is

eminently possible that different regional variations have different sounds for the

Assamese vowel / /. It is shown in the field report of Ladefoged’s study that his

consultants belonged to various parts of Assam, and it is not taken into account how

this heterogeneous representation may have had an implication on the experiment. We

know from previous work on Assamese (Goswami 1970) that the vowels of Western

Assam vary from those of Eastern Assam.

Therefore, it will probably not be far-fetched to believe that Ladefoged’s speaker of

the vowel in the word + does not belong to the speaking population described in this

illustration. Even so, it is plausible that the reference vowel exemplified in Ladefoged’s

set of examples is / as it displays tense harmony when altering from / / /u/.

However, there may be a possibility of unifying the vowel posited by Ladefoged

with the one postulated here. An investigation of the pharyngeal vocal tract may show

that the pharyngeal component is what gives the vowel its '
backed'quality (John Esling,

p.c.). Therefore it may be reasonable to describe the oral vowel as either reduced / / or

as open / /. Articulatory evidence in pharyngeal phonetics shows that retracted vowels

are associated with complex laryngeal mechanisms which may affect the fronting and

raising of those vowels (Esling, 2005). Hence, the retracted (–ATR) quality of the

vowel discussed here may benefit from such an investigation. The retracted feature of

the vowel and the participation of this vowel in the process of vowel harmony (both of
 10

which has been pointed out in this description) may be the result of the pharyngeal

property.

Vowel harmony is a distinguishing feature of the Assamese vowel system. The

tense value of the following high vowel is shared by the mid vowels in the preceding

syllable. Vowel harmony in Assamese is regressive, and in the presence of the two

vowels /i/ and /u/, the preceding /'/ an / / and /u/ change their tense quality to result in

/e/ /o/ and /u/. Harmony affects all the vowels of a word (mostly restricted to a

trisyllabic or quadrisyllabic domain). However, harmony is not attested in longer

syntactic domains and compounds. Assamese vowel harmony is typically word-based,

excluding compounded words and larger morpho-syntactic domains. Vowel harmony in

Assamese is therefore a regressive (right-to-left) process and there are no

morphologically significant positions, which either trigger or target it. The Assamese

examples are given below:

Vowel harmony triggered by the /i/ and /u/ in suffixes

Root Gloss Suffix Derivation Gloss
' ‘frog’ * ‘frog’(dim)
‘above’ " ‘in addition’
‘spend’ "" ‘spend-thrift’
‘silt’ "" ‘fertile land’
') ‘curl’ * ‘curled’
‘dung’ " ‘fly living in dung’

Vowels that do not agree with tense values may be adjacent, in the presence of two

intervening consonants, and also a nasal segment. A nasal, which is in the immediately

adjacent position of a triggering vowel, can block vowel harmony. Some examples of

blocking by nasal segments and consonant clusters are shown below:

 11

Blocking by nasals
' ‘strainer’ ,- * " .
‘dumping ground’ ,- " .
‘leavening agent’ ,- " .

Blocking by coda consonants

‘strength’ ,- " .
‘clan’ ,- .
p mut ‘throwing stick’ (*p " mut .

Surface diphthongs often result from the sequences /ei/, /oi/, /ai/, /ou/, /au/ (regardless

of which member of the pair is assigned stress). In careful speech some speakers

pronounce each vowel separately.

All the vowels discussed till now are phonemically oral. Apart from these oral

vowels, there is a nasal vowel / //. The phonemic existence of this nasal vowel is

demonstrated by the existence of / // and / / minimal pairs, as the following words

show:

/s ‘look’ /s / ‘shadow’
/x ‘sleep’ /x /
/ ‘right’
/g ‘body’ LOCATIVE /g / ‘hole’

Oral vowels following a nasal consonant have a certain degree of nasalization,

exhibiting clear nasal airflow in the whole segment. However, other oral vowels except

/ / do not have nasal counterparts.

 12

Prominence

In marked difference to European languages, the perceptual difference between stressed

and unstressed syllables is reportedly not so easy to establish in the languages of South

Asia, and Assamese is no exception. Owing to this difficulty, there are also differing

views on stress placement rules in Assamese. The notable views on this aspect are those

of Kakati (1962), who accepts Grierson’s (1895) description where Assamese is said to

follow the pan-Indian system of accenting the heavy penultimate syllable. Goswami

(1966) differs from this view and opines that primary stress in Assamese is on the first

or second syllable and never moves beyond the second syllable. Some acoustic

correlates supporting this view, like low-rise in pitch and longer syllable duration were

shown in Mahanta (2001). Mahanta (2001) argues that Assamese follows a trochaic

rhythm and therefore prominence is word initial in non-compounded words. Primary

prominence is on the second syllable if it is a heavy syllable (a closed syllable) and the

first is light (an open syllable), if not, primary prominence is on the first syllable.

Primary prominence is never assigned to any syllable beyond the second syllable. The

following examples of stress in Assamese are from Mahanta (2001)iv.

0 ‘eye’ 1 ‘port’ 1 ‘life’

2 ‘night’ 1 ‘dark’ 1 ‘garden’
1 ‘jewellery’ 1 ‘pride’ 1 ‘happiness’
0" ‘fishing rod’ 1 ‘machine’ 3 ‘importance’

In Assamese, phonetic stress is non-contrastive, and speakers are not aware of any

lexical pairs that differ in meaning because of stress placement. The phonetic correlate

of prominence is an initial low pitch, which progressively becomes higher towards the
 13

end of the prominent syllable. Other correlates like duration and intensity are not

present.

Phonetic transcription

'4 '/ *

44 ' ' ' ' * " " 44 '/ '

" ' ' '* "" " 4 '/ * *

" " 44 * ' '' " ""

" '4 * ' '' * " '44 *

' " '44 " * " "" " '4

* ' ' * '44 * ' ' " ""

" '4 '/ * 44

Orthographic Version

%& ! #" " $" $ $ ! ' () $ $* )) +

$, !- . $$ $ % $/ 0 $ ' () ) 1 $ ) ! !) !- + )2

( 3 4 0 ' () $ $* $ 5# 0 !$ %& ) $ 6 5" ) )

$ 3 $)7 $ !- ) $ ) ) + )2 $ $ $) 8 )9 %& ) $

$ 0 !"# $: !$ ; 0 3 $) $ !- ) $) + )2 $ )

) %& ) $ 0 3 # 0 ! ' () $ ! #" $ $*

 14

References

Esling, John H. (2005). There are no back vowels: The laryngeal articulator model. Canadian Journal of

Linguistics 50, 13–44.

Goswami, Golok Chandra. 1966. An Introduction to Assamese Phonology. Poona: Deccan College.

Goswami, Golok Chandra. 1982. Structures of Assamese. Gauhati University: Department of Publication.

Goswami, Golok Chandra and Jyotiprakash Tamuli. 2003. Asamiya. In Indo-Aryan Languages, Cardona

George and Dhanesh Jain eds. 429–484. Routledge: New York.

Goswami, Upendranath. 1970. A study on Kamrupi, a dialect of Assamese. Gauhati: Dept. of Historical

and Antiquarian Studies.

Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.). 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas,

Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/

Grierson, George Abraham. 1895. On the Stress-Accent in Modern Indo-Aryan Vernaculars. Journal of

the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3, 139–147.

Grierson, George, 1968: Linguistic Survey of India: Vol-V, Part-I and II, New Delhi, Motilal

Banarasidass.

Kakati, Bani Kanta. 1962. Assamese, its formation and development, 3rd edition Gauhati: LBS

Publications.

Ladefoged, Peter and Ian Maddieson. 1990. Vowels of the world’s languages. Journal of Phonetics 18,

93–122.

Ladefoged, Peter & Ian Maddieson. 1996. The sounds of the world’s languages. Oxford: Blackwell.

Ladefoged, Peter. 2001. Vowels and consonants: An introduction to the sounds of the languages. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Ladefoged, Peter. 2003. Phonetic data analysis: An introduction to instrumental phonetic fieldwork.

Oxford: Blackwell.

Ladefoged, Peter. 2007 Articulatory features for describing lexical distinctions Language 83(1), 161–

180.

Mahanta, Shakuntala. 2001. Prominence in Assamese and Assamese English. M.Phil Dissertation.

CIEFL, Hyderabad. (ROA 715 http://roa.rutgers.edu/view.php3?id=990)

 15

Mahanta, Shakuntala. 2008. Directionality and Locality in Vowel Harmony. LOT Dissertation Series

173. Utrecht: Netherlands.

Moral, D. 1992. Phonology of Asamiya Dialects: Contemporary Standard and Mayong. Ph.D. dissertation.

Poona: Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute.

Moral, D. 1996. Consonant gemination and compensatory lengthening in Asamiya dialects: contemporary

standard and central Assam, in Pan Asiatic Linguistics, Vol. I, Salaya, Thailand. Institute of Language

and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University: 151–63

Roach, P. 2004. British English: Received Pronunciation. Journal of the International Phonetic

Association 34(2), 239-245.

The North East Writers’ Forum. 2003. Asomiya: Handpicked Fictions. New Delhi: Katha.

Singh, Prem. 1998. A note on Assamese phonology. Indian Linguistics 59(4), 95–100

i
Assamese is an anglicized term used for the language, but scholars have also used

Asamiya or Asomiya as a close approximation of / x mij /, the word used by the

speakers for their language. Recently, there also have been some initiatives from the

ruling government of the state to promote ‘Asom’ instead of ‘Assam’ as the name of

the state. Beyond that, in terms of usage, neither Asamiya nor Asomiya have any

symbolic significance for the speakers of the language, as Asamiya or Asomiya are not

phonetically equivalent to / x mij /. The reason for using Assamese in this IPA
 

illustration is its wider currency, as a result of which ‘Assamese’ is more easily

recognizable. The entry in ethnography is also under ‘Assamese’.

ii
It is also called the Assamese-Bengali script, which differ from each other only in two

characters and they are which stands for the equivalent of [r] and which is

pronounced in a way which is close to [w].

iii
There are harmonic restrictions on the occurrences of /e/ and /o/ and therefore the

word occurs with a following /i/. This is discussed further in the immediately following

passage.
 16

iv
The recordings provided with this illustration are not from Mahanta (2001).

View publication stats