2 Standard Tajik phonology

Abstract

The present study offers an overview of standard Tajik phonology, focusing mainly on its phonemes and their phonetic representations. Prosodic units and intonation are largely ignored in this article, though some analyses on interrogative intonation patterns are presented in Section 3. This article also surveys previous studies on the phoneme inventory of standard Tajik. It aims to reconcile contradictory statements made in those studies, thereby consolidating them into a coherent description of the standard Tajik phoneme inventory. It will be demonstrated that the contradiction derives, in part, from the fact that some major sound changes that have taken place in standard Tajik since its inception are not acknowledged in the Tajik linguistic literature. Accordingly, particular attention is devoted to the diachronic changes that have taken place in the standard Tajik phoneme inventory, and in the phonetic representations of some of the phonemes it comprises. In describing the changes, this study relies not only on the existing literature in Tajik phonology, most of which was produced during the Soviet period, but also on a speech corpus of present-day standard Tajik. The speech corpus, which the present author compiled in 2012, contains recorded speech produced by newsreaders and announcers working at Dushanbe-based television and radio stations. This use of different data sources facilitates comparison between the standard Tajik in the Soviet period as it is described in the literature, and that in post-civil war Tajikistan, allowing us to identify some recent changes in standard Tajik. This article is organized in four sections. The first section introduces the terminology adopted in this article, after which it describes the development of standard Tajik in relation to its phoneme inventory and the phonetic realization of the phonemes it contains. The section also explains the relationship between standard Tajik and the dialects that have affected it. The second section then provides an overview of the standard Tajik phoneme inventory. It briefly explains the aforementioned speech corpus, after which it describes the standard Tajik phoneme inventory. It reviews the phoneme inventory that has been widely circulated and routinely replicated in grammars and textbooks. This is followed by a discussion of issues, some of them contentious, related to the inventory. Section 2 also puts the prescribed realization of some Tajik phonemes in contrast with the actual realization used in standard spoken Tajik where the latter differs from the former. Seciton 3 touches upon the use of intonation in yes/no and wh- question-answer pairs identified in the aforementioned Tajik speech corpus. The study concludes with a summary of the insights gained from the overview of standard Tajik phonology.