An Acoustic Study of the Manner of Articulation of Uvular Consonant /G/ in Standard Persian

In most Persian phonetics resources, there is no absolute unanimity regarding the manner of articulation of uvular consonant /G/. The present study sought to investigate the manner of articulation in standard conversational Persian through intervocalic, initial, final and clustered phonological environments on the basis of acoustic methods. In so doing, the speech samples of ten native speakers of standard Persian (five males and five females) all from educated class who were unfamiliar to linguistics and were within age range of 20-30 were recorded and analyzed through Praat software. According to the analyses, the following major allophones were recognized: voiced stop [G], approximant [ʁ], and voiced fricative [γ]- in free alternation with each other in most of phonological contexts. Furthermore, in conversational speech of some speakers, in some special words, voiceless fricative [x] was in free alternation with its other variants as an allophone. Statistics shows that voiced stop [G] in the above-mentioned contexts occurs more frequently than other variants. It can be concluded that the most frequent variant and representative of this phoneme in standard Persian must be known as /G/.