Intonation Patterns in Manipuri – Kannada Bilinguals

Abstract

Intonation refers to the movement of pitch in a sentence/phrase. Manipuri is a tonal language having a lexically significant, contrastive, relative pitch on each syllable while Kannada is a non- tonal language with typical patterns of intonation for different types of sentences. Philip, Maheshwari and Savithri (2008) indicated a carryover of tonal patterns from Manipuri to English in ManipuriEnglish bilinguals. However, insignificant efforts have been attempted to investigate intonation patterns of tonal language speaker speaking non- tonal language. Hence, the present study compared the intonation patterns in native Kannada speakers and bilingual Manipuri- Kannada speakers speaking Kannada. Two groups of subjects participated in the study. Group I included five native Kannada speakers and Group II had five Manipuri- Kannada late bilingual speakers. Subjects imitated four standard Kannada sentences depicting question, statement, surprise and sarcasm. The recorded sentences were analysed for intonation contours, tone height and tone duration using Praat software. Results of the study indicated decreased Fo range and 100% correct Fo contours for statements in group II subjects.