Frequency of Occurence of Phonemes in Kannada: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Kannada is one of the traditional languages among the four Dravidian languages with a fine grammatical tradition. It is an enriched language with complex range of regional, social and stylistic variations. The frequency of occurrence of phoneme data is crucial to understand the language structure and also has wide applications in audiology and speech language pathology. The phoneme frequency is under research since 1930s. Studies on phonemes in various languages like English (Delattre, as cited in Edwards, 2003) Hindi (Ghatage, 1964), Oriya (Kelkar, 1994) were based on written source of materials. The purpose of the present study was to obtain the frequency of occurrence of various phonemes in Kannada using conversation samples. Participants included 21 fluent native speakers of Mysore dialect of Kannada in the age range of 20 to 50 years divided into 5 groups. Conversation sample of each of the five groups were recorded separately for 25-30 minutes. The samples obtained were transcribed using IPA transcription. Inter judge and intra judge reliability of phonetic transcription was evaluated for 10% of the recorded samples. Further it was analyzed using the SALT software for obtaining frequency of phonemes. Mean and standard deviation of frequency of phonemes of all the five samples were obtained. The results show that vowel /a/ was the most frequently occurring phoneme followed by /n/, /I/. /e/, /r/, /a:/, /d/, /l/, /u/, /g/ and /k/ in Kannada. Phonemes /h/, /s/, /p/, /t /, /dʒ/, // were less frequent in conversational samples. Overall, vowels constituted 44.3% and consonants 55.3% of the data. The results obtained will aid audiologists and speech language pathologists in developing and updating the existing test material for evaluating various communication disorders and also for selection of treatment targets in such population. The study has implications in the area of linguistics and speech synthesis tasks also.