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Title Sociophonetic Variation among Undergradutae Pashtun Speakers of English: An Investigation of English Monophthongs

Author(s) MUNAZZA SAEED

Abstract Title: Sociophonetic Variation among Undergraduate Pashtun Speakers of English: An Investigation of English Monophthongs This research studies monophthongal variation in the L2 English of young Pashtun speakers who are undergraduate students of BS English programme, based on speech production data obtained from two institutes in Karak district (of northwestern Pakistan) in the perspective of sociophonetics. It aims to examine the extent of this variation in English monophthong sounds in the speech of Pashtun speakers and to understand how this variation is affected by the factors of socioeconomic status and gender. In other words, the features of speech or pronunciations of a Pashtun speaker constitute the dependent variable and his or her socioeconomic status and gender the independent variables. Data obtained in the form of audio recordings in which a participant reads three short tales in English from a text, collected from a total of forty four students with equal representation of gender, shows that there exists a strong degree of variation among these speakers of Pashto English. This variation is both phonological and phonetic in nature. The phonetic variation is analysed as a score of similarity and in the form of percentage of all the tokens uttered by a participants compared with the Received Pronunciation (i.e. British English). The findings indicate that whereas there does not occur any correlation between a participant’s socioeconomic status and the features of his or her speech, the variation does seem to pattern along the factor of gender, with the female participants performing better than their male counterparts frequently and overall.

Type Thesis/Dissertation

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2023-08-09

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