The tonal system of Pahari
The tonal system of Pahari

Summary/Abstract: This paper reports on an acoustic study of the tonal system of the Pahari language. To achieve this aim, an experiment was conducted. Eight native speakers were given a set of monosyllabic triplets bearing three target tones to read them aloud for recording in a carrier sentence. The acoustic measures included F0, final velocity, and duration. The acoustic and statistical results show that (1) the average F0 demonstrates significant difference in the height of the pitch track of the three target words/tones; (2) final velocity shows three trends, namely falling, level, and rising associated with high, mid, and low tones, respectively; and (3) duration results indicate that high pitch track was significantly shorter than each of the other two pitch tracks. The study concludes that Pahari has three tones, namely high-falling, mid-level, and low-rising.

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