The realisation and phonetic features of the glottal stop in Bahdini Kurdish

Abstract

In Bahdini Kurdish (henceforth, BK), the realisation and the phonetic features of the glottal stop (GS) has not been extensively investigated and there is a debate about its phonemic status. In one hand, it is considered a phoneme that occurs only in a word-initial position. On the other hand, it is not con- sidered a phoneme but optionally produced at the beginning of vowel-initial words and does not affect meaning. The study aims at identifying the realisation of this sound experimentally, analyses its acous- tic features and whether it is affected by parameters such as vowel type, vowel position in the word and stress. The study is based on read speech produced by 10 BK native speakers. Then it is analysed phonetically using Praat to identify the presence/absence of the GS. Then the number of occurrences of the GSs are compared across vowel types, vowel position and stress. The results show that the GS is an epenthetic sound in BK that is inserted by the speakers to avoid onsetless syllables and to avoid vowel clusters. Different phonetic variations of the sound are realized in BK: A clear closure of the glottal stop, intermittent vocal folds vibrations during the GS closure, vocal folds vibrations start sim- ultaneously with the GS release. It appears not to be affected by stress but by position, as it is found more medially in V+V contexts than initially, and vowel quality as it is produced more before low vowels than non-low vowels.