An acoustic and articulatory investigation of the Mauritian vowel inventory

While there have been a decent amount of morphosyntactic and sociolinguistic studies on Mauritian, a “French-based” creole spoken by most of the population of Mauritius (e.g. Baker 1972, Alleesaib 2012, Henri 2010, Miller 2015, Syea 2013), phonetic or phonological description on the language hardly exists. Pudaruth (1993) proposes a phoneme inventory consisting of 19 consonants and 8 vowels, intuitively noting that rhotics preceding vowels are weakened, almost unpronounced. In the present work, we empirically investigate the vowel inventory of Mauritian using acoustic and articulatory data. In addition to presenting basic acoustic measures (e.g. vowel spaces), we investigate the rhotic and report acoustic measures which suggest strong variation between the orthographic “a” that precedes “r” and that which precedes all other written consonants. Ultrasound imaging confirms that the pre-rhotic “a” differs from other “a”s articulatorily.