Hindi-Urdu phonology

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Urdu and Modern Standard Hindi are the respective national languages of Pakistan and India. The two are often held as separate languages on the bases of higher vocabulary choice (and thus mutual intelligibility) as well as cultural orientation; however on a linguistic basis they are two standardized registers of a single subdialect, that being the Khari boli dialect of Delhi.^[1] Keeping in line with such a linguistic analysis, Hindi and Urdu occupy a single descriptive phonology page, with attention paid to phonological variations between the two registers, and associated dialects, wherever they arise.

1 Vowels
2 Consonants
- 2.1 External borrowing
3 Supra-segmental features
4 See also
5 References
6 Bibliography

[edit] Vowels

Image:Hindi vowel chart.png

The vowel phonemes of Hindi according to Ohala (1999:102)

Hindi/Urdu natively possesses a symmetrical ten-vowel system.^[2] All ten can be nasalized,^[3] though there is disagreement over the extent to which nasalization is phonemic.^[4] Among the close vowels, what in Sanskrit are thought to have been primarily distinctions of vowel length (that is /i/ ~ /iː/ and /u/ ~ /uː/) have become in Hindi/Urdu distinctions of quality, or length accompanied by quality (that is, /ɪ/ ~ /iː/ and /ʊ/ ~ /uː/).^[5] The historical opposition of length in the close vowels has been neutralized in word-final position, for example śakti "energy" is /ʃəkt̪i/, not /ʃəkt̪ɪ/, and vastu "item" is /ʋəst̪u/, not /ʋəst̪ʊ/.^[6]

An eleventh vowel, /æ/, is found in English loanwords, such as /bæʈ/ "bat".^[3] (Some transcriptions, such as Shapiro (2003:258) and Masica (1991:110), transcribe ऐ /ɛ/ as [æ] rather than [ɛ], but it is not as open as the /æ/ from English.)

[ɛː] and [ɔː] are the standard educated Delhi pronunciations of ऐ ai and औ au. Diphthongal realizations, ranging from [əɪ] to [ɑɪ] and from [əu] to [ɑu], respectively, are common in eastern Hindi dialects and many non-standard western dialects.^[6] In addition, [ɛ] occurs as a conditioned allophone of /ə/ in proximity to /h/, for example in kahnā [kɛhnɑ] "to say".^[6]

[edit] Consonants

Hindi/Urdu has a core set of 28 consonants inherited from earlier Indo-Aryan. Supplementing these are 2 consonants that are internal developments in specific word-medial contexts,^[7] and 7 consonants originally found in loan words, whose expression is dependent on factors such as status (class, education, etc.) and cultural register (Modern Standard Hindi vs Urdu).

Most native consonants may occur geminate (doubled in length; exceptions are /bʱ/, /ɽ/, /ɽʱ/, /ɦ/). Geminate consonants are always medial and preceded by one of the interior vowels (that is, /ə/, /ɪ/, or /ʊ/). They all occur monomorphemically except [ʃː] which occurs only in a few Sanskrit loans where a morpheme boundary could be posited in between (i.e. /nɪʃ + ʃil/ for [nɪʃːil] "without shame").^[3]

For the English speaker, a notable feature of the Hindi/Urdu consonants is that there is a four-way distinction of phonation among plosives, rather than the two-way distinction found in English. The phonations are tenuis, as /p/, voiced, as /b/, aspirated, as /pʰ/, and murmured, as /bʱ/. The last is commonly called "voiced aspirate".

Also notable are the retroflex consonants. Prototypical retroflex consonants, as found in many Dravidian languages, are pronounced by curling the tongue back so that the underside of the tip of the tongue contacts the roof of the mouth in the post-alveolar or pre-palatal region. However in Hindi/Urdu, as in most languages with retroflex consonants, it in the tip of the tongue that contacts the roof of the mouth; sometimes these consonants may even be realized with alveolar contact,^[8] contrasting with the dental series primarily in being apical (making contact with the tip of the tongue) rather than laminal (making contact with the blade of the tongue). The retroflex flaps are similar, tapping the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth.

	Bilabial		Labio- dental	Dental/ Alveolar		Retroflex		Post-alveolar/ Palatal		Velar		Uvular
Nasal	m			n		(ɳ)
Plosive	p pʰ	b bʱ		t̪ t̪ʰ	d̪ d̪ʱ	ʈ ʈʰ	ɖ ɖʱ			k kʰ	g gʱ	(q)
Affricate								tʃ tʃʰ	dʒ dʒʱ
Fricative			f	s	z			ʃ		(x)	(ɣ)		ɦ
Tap or Flap				ɾ		(ɽ) (ɽʱ)
Approximant			ʋ	l				j

Table: Consonants of Hindi and Urdu. Marginal and non-universal phonemes are in parentheses.

The palatal affricates do not have as sharply fricated a release as in English, being more plosive. It is not clear whether they are actually palatal, or postalveolar as in English. Tiwari ([1966] 2004) classifies them as palatal, but as affricates and not the pure plosives /c/, /cʰ/, /ɟ/, /ɟʱ/ that Sanskrit is believed to have had.

Stops in final position are not released; /ʋ/ varies freely as [v], and can also be pronounced [w]; /ɾ/ can surface as a trill [r], and geminate /ɾː/ is always a trill.^[9] The palatal and velar nasals [ɲ], [ŋ] occur only in consonant clusters with a following homorganic stops, as allophones of nasal vowels followed by a stop, and in Sanskrit loanwords.^[7]^[9] There are murmured sonorants, [lʱ], [ɾʱ], [mʱ], [nʱ], but these are considered to be consonant clusters with /ɦ/ in the analysis adopted by Ohala (1999).

[edit] External borrowing

Loanwords from Sanskrit reintroduced /ɳ/ (marked orange in the chart) into formal Modern Standard Hindi. In casual speech it is usually replaced by /n/.^[3] It does not occur initially and has a nasalized flap [ɽ̃] as a common allophone.^[7]

Loanwords from Persian introduced five consonants not previously found in Indic languages, /f/, /z/, /q/, /x/, /ɣ/. Being Persian in origin, these are seen as a defining feature of Urdu. Among these, /f/ and /z/, also found in English loanwords, are now considered well-established in Hindi; indeed, /f/ appears to be encroaching upon and replacing /pʰ/ even in native (non-Persian, non-English) Hindi words.^[7]

The other three Persian loans, /q/, /x/, /ɣ/, (marked green in the chart), are still considered to fall under the domain of Urdu, and are normally assimilated by Hindi speakers to /k/, /kʰ/, and /g/.^[10] The sibilant /ʃ/ is found in loanwords from all sources (English, Persian, Sanskrit) and is well-established.^[3] Hindi speakers (often non-urban) who fail to maintain /f/, /z/, and /ʃ/ (assimilated to /pʰ/, /dʒ/, and /s/) are thus substandard by definition. Yet these same speakers, having a Sanskritic education, may hyperformally uphold /ɳ/ and [ʂ]. In contrast, for native speakers of Urdu, the maintenance of /f/, /z/, and /ʃ/ is not commensurate with education and sophistication, but is characteristic of all social levels.^[10]

If only native Indo-Aryan vocabulary is taken into account, it is possible to consider the retroflex flaps [ɽ], [ɽʱ] to be word-medial or word-final allophones of the voiced retroflex plosives /ɖ/, /ɖʱ/. However, the adoption of English loans with alveolar stops, which are identified with Hindi/Urdu retroflex rather than dental stops (as with bat above), has led to the emergence of minimal pairs, thus conferring marginal phonemic status to the flaps.^[7]

Being the main sources from which Hindi/Urdu draws its higher, learned terms– English, Sanskrit, Arabic, and to a lesser extent Persian provide loanwords with a rich array of consonant clusters. The introduction of these clusters into the language in fact contravenes an historical tendency within its native core vocabulary to eliminate clusters through processes such as cluster reduction and epenthesis.^[11]

[edit] Supra-segmental features

Hindi-Urdu has a stress accent, but it is not so important as in English. Usually in a multisyllabic Hindi word, the stress falls on the last syllable if all the syllables are equally heavy or equally light. (A light syllable is closed by a short vowel a, i, u, while a medium syllable is closed by a long vowel or diphthong ā, e, ī, o, ū, au, ai or by two consonants, and a heavy syllable is closed by both a long vowel/diphthong and two consonants.) If the word contains a mixture or heavy and light syllables, the stress falls automatically on the penultimate heaviest syllable. (Cf. McGregor, pp. xx-xxi.) Content words in Hindustani normally begin on a low pitch, followed by a rise in pitch.^[12]^[13] Strictly speaking, Hindi-Urdu, like most other Indian languages, is rather a syllable timed language. The schwa /ə/ has a strong tendency to vanish into nothing (syncopated) if its syllable is unaccented. Also note that in written Hindi, many words end in short /u/ or short /i/, but in speech they are often converted to ending in long /uː/ or long /iː/, respectively.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

^ Masica (1991:27-28)
^ Masica (1991:110)
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Ohala (1999:101)
^ Masica (1991:117)
^ Masica (1991:111)
^ ^a ^b ^c Shapiro (2003:258)
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Shapiro (2003:260)
^ Tiwari ([1966] 2004)^{[page # needed]}
^ ^a ^b Ohala (1999:102)
^ ^a ^b Masica (1991:92)
^ Shapiro (2003:261)
^ http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/linguistics/theses/2001Dyrud.PDF Dyrud, Lars O. (2001) Hindi-Urdu: Stress Accent or Non-Stress Accent? (University of North Dakota, master's thesis)
^ http://www.speech.sri.com/people/rao/papers/icslp96_wbhyp.pdf Ramana Rao, G.V. and Srichand, J. (1996) Word Boundary Detection Using Pitch Variations. (IIT Madras, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering)

[edit] Bibliography

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Masica, Colin (1991), written at Cambridge, The Indo-Aryan Languages, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521299442.
Ohala, Manjari (1999), "Hindi", in International Phonetic Association, Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: a Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Cambridge University Press, 100-103, ISBN 9780521637510, <http://www.rosettaproject.org/archive/hin/phon-3?page_view=image_view>.
Schmidt, Ruth Laila (2003), "Urdu", in Cardona, George & Dhanesh Jain, The Indo-Aryan Languages, Routledge, 286-350, ISBN 9780415772945.
Shapiro, Michael C. (2003), "Hindi", in Cardona, George & Dhanesh Jain, The Indo-Aryan Languages, Routledge, 250-285, ISBN 9780415772945.