خلاصة:
The aim of the present paper is to study the status of the short vowels /i/ and /u/ in five selected Iranian Balochi dialects. These dialects are spoken in Sistan (SI), Saravan (SA), Khash (KH), Iranshahr (IR), and Chabahar (CH) regions located in province Sistan va Baluchestan in the southeast of Iran. This study investigates whether these two vowels have the same qualities as the short /i/ and /u/ do in the Common Balochi inventory (i, iː, u, uː, a, aː, eː, oː). The Common Balochi inventory is the vowel system represented generally for Balochi language, which is a North-Western Iranian language, a sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian family. The data for this survey are gathered from villages, rural areas, and cities in these regions in the forms of free speech and verbal elicitation from more than 20 literate and non-literate male and female language consultants, 2 males and 2 females for each dialect. The investigation reveals that the short /i/ and /u/ show strong tendencies towards a lower position. This study suggests phonemic systems in which the short /i/ is modified to short /e/ in all dialects, but /u/ is modified to /o/ only in SI, SA, and CH; the lowering of the short /u/ to short /o/ in KH and IR may still be in the transition stage. It is possible that Persian, as the dominant language has had its influence on these dialects causing a lowering tendency in the two vowels under study.
ملخص الجهاز:
"With the aid of instrumental analysis, this study investigates the quality of the short vowels /i/ and /u/ in five Iranian Balochi dialects, SI, SA, KH, IR, and CH, spoken in the Sistan va Baluchestan3 province in the southeast of Iran.
Figure 1 shows spectrograms of the four primary cardinal vowels [i, e, o, u] (produced by Pétur Helgason 2007, recorded in laboratory condition) as samples to show the formants and their qualities in the speech of a male speaker.
The figure clearly shows that most of the long /i2/ tokens, both for male and female speakers, have lower F1 and higher F2 values than those of the short /i/.
They indicate a pronunciation approximating [e] or [e] for the short /i/, but for the long /i2/ the formant values are closer to a cardinal [i] vowel, specifically for the female speakers.
For the male speaker, the range of the formant values for /u/ and /u2/ overlap partly, while the female /u2/ tends to have slightly lower frequencies for both F1 and F2 than does /u/, indicating that it is produced higher and further back.
The short /i/ values are lower, closer to the vowels [e] or [e] (there are, in fact, examples of the same word being produced with these two vowel qualities in different repetitions by the same speaker).
By contrast, the short /i/ in words such as dil ‘heart’, bil ‘put!’, and gipt ‘he/she got’ are generally produced with a slightly lower vowel, towards an [e] quality."