Seetha Jayaraman

An Acoustic Phonetic Analysis of Railway Announcements in English Seetha Jayaraman

Variation in speech exists across different speakers and can be measured and accounted for articulatory differences accurately in acoustic terms. The study analyzes the acoustic phonetic features of Railway announcements. Acoustic structure of various consonants such as plosives,affricates, fricatives & nasals (except semi-consonants are measured and each class of consonants),are discussed in detail. The book is the first study undertaken,and needs further investigation to reaffirm the variations taking other sociolinguistic factors of the speakers into view. The investigation is based on an experimental analysis of actual speech samples drawn from an Indian variety of English. It is observed that variation is more marked in the articulation of vowels and diphthongs than in consonants. The book is of interest to students and researchers on phonetic and phonological study of different varieties of English spoken outside an English-speaking area, more specifically in a multilingual, multilingual setting like India.