Description of Phoneme Structure of Bolkheyr Dialect: An IPA Approach

Tangestan County in Bushehr province is divided into two districts: centeral and Delvar. Bolkheyr village is the central part of the rural province of Bolkheyr in Dalvar district. Bolkheyr Dialect is a variation of Tangsiri dialect (Tangestani). In this research, the aim was to investigate and describe phoneme structure of Bolkheyr dialect. To gather the needed linguistic data, this study made use of interviewing the proper speakers (informant), audio recording of the interviews, and phonetic transcription of the audio recordings. The method of this study was a mixture of field research and descriptive-analytic research using library instruments. The data gathered using the aforementioned instruments was analyzed using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This study investigated alliteration, distribution, and features of both vowels and consonants and examined the phonemic processes and syllable structure of Bolkheyr dialect. Research findings indicated that Bolkheyr dialect includes 25 consonants and 9 vowels (6 Monophthongs and 3 diphthongs). All consonants in this dialect are aspirated. Bolkheyr dialect has two more consonants than the standard Persian: /w, ŋ/. According to the syllable meter, syllable structures of this dialect are divided into three main groups of light, heavy, and super-heavy. All in all, the representation of cv(:)(c(c)) can be used to show the variety of syllable and phonemic structures of Bolkheyr dialect. In this dialect, all syllables start with a consonant and consecutive consonants cannot co-occur in the beginning of a syllable. In addition, like Standard Persian, lexicons never end in two consonants. The most frequent phonemic processes in this dialect are assimilation, dissimilation, elision, epenthesis, metathesis, and in some cases a combination of some of these processes.