Diphthongs and Kildin Saami vowel system

Ural-Altaic Studies. 2023. No. 51. P. 7–26.

Buzanov A., Egorov I., Molchanov V.

The aim of this paper is to present a revision of the phonological system of Kildin Saami. This revision is based on the results of a computational analysis of the Kildin vowel inventory. Specifically, a number of segments that have been variously described by different scholars as either diphthongs or monophthongs have been examined using two automatic methods: trajectory length and changepoint detection. These methods were tested on the material of Estonian and Lithuanian before the examination of the Kildin data. The data analyzed in this research was collected during fieldwork in the city of Murmansk, the rural locality of Lujaavv’r (Lovozero), and the urban locality of Verkhnetulomsky in the Murmansk Oblast of Russia in 2021 and 2022. Computational analysis revealed that the segments analyzed by some scholars as diphthongs /ie/ and /ea/ are monophthongs /eː/ and /aː/ occurring after palatal and palatalized consonants. The low back vowels analyzed sometimes as diphthongs /oa/ and /oaː/ are monophthongs /ɒ/ and /ɒː/. The first component of /ua/ is acoustically closer to /o(ː)/ than to /u(ː)/. The phonetic quality of /ue/ remains to be defined. It is proposed to analyze this phoneme as having three allophones in free variation, diphthong [ʊə] (or even [ɔə]) and monophthongs [ɵː] and [əː]. /i/ and /ɨ/ were shown to be in contrastive distribution only word-initially if Russian loanwords are taken into consideration, so /i/ should be considered a marginal phoneme. /i/-final diphthongs and triphthongs are proposed not to be postulated and analyzed instead as combinations of vowels with /j/ or /jː/. The vowel inventory thus comprises two diphthongs and thirteen monophthongs.

Keywords: vowels, phonology, diphthongs, instrumental phonetics, Kildin Saami