Epenthesis in Urdu

Abstract

The motivation of this research is epenthesis, an important Urdu phonological phenomenon. Presently, this work deals with the phonological rules for understanding the role of epenthesis and re-syllabification in Urdu content words, at larger scale, in speech of Pakistani Urdu speakers. The 10 hours audio-corpus has become the source of motivation for the current study due to its multiple pronunciations (Farooq & Mumtaz, 2016), (Farooq & Mahmood, 2020). That annotated speech data has multiple information i.e., same parts-of speech (POS), spellings and meanings but different pronunciations which ultimately becomes the cause of re-syllabification at different places and contexts. Therefore, that annotated speech corpus is used as baseline of this research (Mumtaz, et al., 2014), (Habib, Hijab, Hussain, & Adeeba, 2014) but the selected words’ list includes only those words which have different pronunciations occurred due to the epenthesis. Later this list has been shared and asked to record by 29 native Urdu speakers in Pakistan. Thus, data analysis has confirmed different reasons for causing epenthesis in Urdu; (i) contextual variations, (ii) inter-speaker variations, (iii) stress variations, (iv) multilingual effect, etc. All these variations become the reasons for alternative pronunciations. It is also confirmed that alternative pronunciations are present in the speech data of all speakers but a speaker can use a single pronunciation at a time. Therefore, all different pronunciations have attained the status of alternative pronunciations (Farooq & Mumtaz, 2016) in Pakistani Urdu.