The Acoustics of Vocalic Elements

This paper examines the acoustics of vowels in the phoneme inventory of Fulfulde language. The paper studies the Sokoto dialect of the language and conducts an acoustic analysis of its vowels. This is a departure from the traditional auditory impression-based accounts of phonological phenomena. The study uses the software Praat to measure the formant frequencies of the vowels in addition to an LPC analysis. The waveforms and spectrograms of the vowels as well as their formant frequencies determinie the status, height and positions of the vowels. Findings indicate that the Sokoto dialect of Fulfulde has five short vowels and five corresponding long ones. Using the software R, the study develops a vowel chart for the dialect. The status of diphthongs is however a subject of controversy and is therefore left for further research.