A Phonetic Description of the Lelepa Vowel System
Abstract
Lelepa is an Oceanic language in central Vanuatu. In the main descriptive work on the language, Lacrampe (2014) states that Lelepa has five vowel qualities /i, e, a, o, u/ and also a length contrast between the open vowels /a/ and /aa/. However, there are still some unresolved questions about the sound system, such as the existence of other long vowels and the relationship between vowel quality and specific consonantal environments. This study aims to provide a comprehensive acoustic description and analysis of the Lelepa vowel system. Based on a corpus of natural speech data collected by Lacrampe (2017), a total of 4,750 vowel tokens were analysed in this study. Results based on duration show that length contrasts can be observed for five distinct vowel qualities as in nearby languages. Results based on formant frequencies provide supporting evidence that Lelepa uses a five-vowel system /i, e, a, u, o/, but the realisation of these vowels can be significantly affected by the types of consonants that precede and follow them. This contributes to the understanding of Lelepa and its relationship to other languages of central Vanuatu in the context of the linguistic diversity of the region.