Invariant vowel realizations Group 1B

This group consists of vowels which showed no variation within Pakistani speakers, but differed from RP. Table 4 is a list of these vowels.

The first three words in this group are bi-syllabic. In RP, the second syllable is unstressed and, as a result of unstressing, the vowel is frequently reduced to [ə]. For example, RP speakers stress the first vowel and reduce the second to a lax mid-central vowel, schwa, in [letə] letter or [kɔmə] comma. Pakistani speakers did not reduce the vowel but rather used a full vowel, e.g., [lettΛr] letter or [kɔ:mmΛ] comma. Thus, there were no observed instances of schwa in the data collected using the Sheffield set (however, instances of /ə/ were observed in connected speech and will be discussed later).

The NURSE vowel is [Λ] and the LOT vowel [ɔ:].Their RP equivalents, [з:] and [ɔ], are not attested in the samples of PakE collected for this study. The tense midhigh central vowel [з:] is not attested in Rahman (1990) – see rhoticity for a discussion of Rahman’s work on PakE. Nihalani, Hosali and Tongue (1989) also do not list this vowel in their table of ‘Educated Indian English’ monophthongs. However, they do list the lax low back vowel [ɔ] in words such as cot and caught. Pakistani speakers in this study substitute [ɔ] with either a tense mid back vowel, [ç], as in LOT or a tense mid-high back vowel, [o:], as in CLOTH. It is possible to explain the absence of the vowels [з:] and [ɔ] by looking at the Urdu vowel system. Urdu does not use either of these vowels and thus it may be the case that PakE speaker replace these with Urdu vowels.