Gender Roles on Vowel Quality. A Spectographic Study on Asante Twi

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2021 in the subject African Studies - Linguistics, , language: English, abstract: Studies on vowel quality have become fundamental in many acoustic research works on vowels and it has received some great deal of research attention by many phoneticians across the world. This study discuss an acoustic analysis of male and female speakers' production of the Vowels of Asante Twi of the Akan Language in relation to their gender. Sixteen vowels of Asante Twi were put in monosyllabic words for four respondents (2 males 2 females) to say them. The voices were recorded with a Huawei Y9 android smart phone and analysed with PRAAT. The data revealed that female speakers have higher pitch in the production of the Twi vowels as compared to the male speakers. In addition, female speakers' production of vowels, particularly the back vowels have higher intensity than that of the male speakers whiles duration in nasal vowels appear to be longer than the oral vowels for both males and females. Among other things, the study revealed that there exist a direct relationship between the gender or a speaker and the quality of vowel expected produced by a speaker as far as the production of Vowels of Asante Twi are concerned.