Nasal Counterparts Of Bengali Vowels: A Corpus Study

Abstract

This study delves into the nasal vowels of Bangla (also known as Bengali) with the primary objective of discerning their phonemic status. While it has long been assumed that each of the seven monophthongal oral vowels in Bangla possesses a phonetically contrastive nasal counterpart, a comprehensive examination of this subject has been conspicuously absent from the existing literature. Employing a phoneme dictionary generated from a corpus comprising 15 million-word tokens and encompassing approximately 300 thousand-word types, this research endeavors to determine whether all oral vowels indeed exhibit phonemically contrastive nasal vowel counterparts. The findings of this investigation suggest that only five out of the seven monophthongs manifest phonetically contrastive relationships with their nasal counterparts, thereby revealing the absence of this link between nasality and the vowels /ɔ/ and /æ/.