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Part of
Studies on Variation in Portuguese
Edited by Pilar P. Barbosa, Maria da Conceição de Paiva and Celeste Rodrigues
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 14] 2017
► pp. 23–48

Chapter 1
Stressed vowels of European Portuguese in spontaneous speech

| University of Toronto, Canada
| University of Lisbon, Portugal
| University of Minho, Portugal

We analyzed speech data of two corpora collected with a 15–17-year gap in Braga, Portugal, to study the acoustic features of European Portuguese (EP) vowels in spontaneous speech, and to understand whether the vowels produced in this northern dialect are acoustically distinct from those of the standard variety, and if diachronic changes occurred in vowel quality. The results revealed that vowels in the speech of Braga are more open, the front vowels are more centralized, and the back vowels are less back than in the Lisbon variety, suggesting the existence of phonetic contrasts in these regional varieties of EP. Differences in vowel quality between the two speech corpora were also found; however, they may not suggest diachronic change, but rather the effect of a methodological factor in data collection.

Keywords: Braga’s speech variety, stressed vowel system, spontaneous speech, diachronic change
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The European Portuguese vowel system
  • 3.Previous acoustic studies of the vowel system of European Portuguese
  • 4.Method
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Final remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.14.01rat
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