The sounds of Japanese English: Monophthong vowels and rhythmic patterning

ABSTRACT

This article offers finer-grained acoustic analyses of two aspects of the linguistic sound system of Japanese English (JpE): monophthongal vowels and rhythmic patterning. At the segmental level, though past research has examined the vocalic inventory of JpE, these studies have tended to focus on vowel quality differences in the acoustic space. Our study approaches the acoustic investigation of monophthongal vowels in JpE by examining not just vowel quality, but also vowel duration. At the level of prosody, we conduct a quantitative analysis of the rhythm of JpE using the pairwise variability index. Results suggest that monophthongal vowels in JpE do not exhibit a homogeneous pattern of ‘conflation’ in terms of vowel quality or duration, and that JpE tends towards a stress-timed patterning of speech rhythm. Hence, the empirical data argue for the need of a ‘pluricentric’ paradigm to undergird world Englishes research, rather than a ‘monolithic’, Inner Circle norm-centric framework.

KEYWORDS:

• monophthongs
• vowel duration
• rhythm
• pairwise variability index (PVI)
• Japanese English

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term ‘Japanese English’ is used in this article to reflect the goal of approaching the study of all varieties of English—Asian Englishes or otherwise—from an egalitarian and ‘plurilithic’ perspective, the fact that English is not presently used as a communication medium within Japan notwithstanding.

2. Nihalani (1999) used the term suprasegmental, which is often used interchangeably with prosody/prosodic in the phonetics literature, although some scholars do make a terminological distinction between the two. For the purpose of this discussion, prosody/prosodic will be used in this article.

3. While some works on rhythm do exist (e.g. Grenon & White, 2008; Kawase et al., 2016), these works expressly approached the study of rhythm from the perspective of JpE learners with the acquisition of Inner Circle rhythmic patterns as an explicit theme. For the purpose of linguistic typology, phonetic descriptions with norm-centric orientations are inappropriate, and a quantitative examination of JpE rhythm on its own terms is needed.

4. See Deterding (2006) for the full exposition of this issue.

5. An in-depth elucidation of the ‘extrinsic/intrinsic’ classification system of vowel normalisation techniques goes beyond the scope and purpose of this article. For more on such normalisation technique differences, see Reetz and Jongman (2009), Adank (2003) and Thomas (2011, pp. 160–171).

6. Scare quotes are used to indicate that the term ‘standards’ is not used prescriptively but rather as a mere acknowledgement that the much-studied models of English pronunciation, namely RP and GAE, serve as convenient frames of reference in plain virtue of the fact that much data about them currently exist in the literature and can be useful for cross-linguistic/varietal comparisons.

7. Colloquially known as ‘long’ and ‘short’ vowels despite differences in vowel quality and not just duration.

8. Although Yano (2011, pp. 133–134) deemed it unlikely that ‘Japanese English’ will evolve into a stable variety, we follow Deterding and Sharbawi (2013, p. 7) in according the respect due to an emergent variety of English by using the term ‘Japanese English’ and conceiving the reification of JpE endonormative standards as possible.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NIESCEA project ‘Building an NIE Spoken Corpus of English in Asia (NIESCEA)’ funded by the Research Support for Senior Academic Administrator (RS-SAA) grant from the National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore [grant RS 9/12 LEL].