Sounds across borders : a comparative study of Bangla and Thai phonological systems

Abstract

In this thesis, the phonology of Bangla and Thai is described and compared, paying close attention to the inventories of the vowels and consonants in these languages. Both languages have different language families, i.e. Indo-Aryan and Kra-Dai, but they share the more general South and Southeast Asian lingual zone and have typological differences in addition to contact-influenced convergences. The study employs qualitative methodology of phonetics using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to compare segmental characteristics of aspiration, voicing, retroflexion, vowel quality, and vowel length, and suprasegmental characteristics, including tone, and syllable structure. The results show that Bangla has higher functional load on consonantal contrasts whereas Thai has phonological contrast that is distributed amongst vowel, tone and consonant classes interactions. The analysis placed in the context of the phonological typology and historical contact positions allows the study to make contributions to the cross-linguistic research in the field of Asian phonology and provide the insights that could be applied in language teaching and comparative linguistics.