The Vowel System of Korebaju

Jenifer Vega Rodríguez (1)

1 Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

Korebaju [kòrèβáhɨ̀] (ISO 639-3: coe) is a Western Tukanoan language from the South Western part of Colombia. A study conducted in 2017 and 2018 with six native speakers (3 female and 3 male) shows that Korebaju has an inventory of 17 consonants /p, t, k, pʰ, tʰ, kʰ, β, ɸ, s, h, t ͡ ʃ, m, n, ɲ, ʰm, ʰŋ, r/ and 6 oral vowels /i, e, a, o, u, ɨ/, 6 nasal vowels /ĩ, ẽ, ã, õ, ũ, ɨ̃/ and 3 glottal vowels /aˀ, eˀ, oˀ/. Contrary to previous studies, this paper shows that Korebaju does not include the vowel [ɯ] in its phonemic inventory. The vowel [ɯ] is an allophone of the high back vowel /u/ when it follows a palatal consonant. In the same context, the high central vowel /ɨ/ also has an allophone [ɪ]. This paper focuses on an acoustic and articulatory description. Data come from a set of words recorded with synchronized audio and EGG signals.

Mots clés: Acoustic and articulatory phonetics; glottal features; language description

Domaines: Linguistique

Jenifer Vega Rodríguez. The Vowel System of Korebaju. INTERSPEECH 2019, Sep 2019, Graz, Austria. ⟨10.21437/Interspeech.2019-3210⟩. ⟨hal-02420035⟩