Sgaw Karen as spoken by a member of the local North Carolina Karen community: a phonetic analysis and phonemic description

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Fischer, Lucia
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Linguistics

Abstract

This thesis describes some of the phonetic characteristics and provides a phonemic analysis of Sgaw Karen, a Tibeto-Burman language, as spoken by a community member in central North Carolina. All of the segments are analyzed in terms of minimal pairs in order to establish phonemicity. Additionally, vowels are described in terms of their formant frequencies, tones are described using their F0, and consonants are compared through spectrograms. Lastly, the structure of syllables is delimited and consonant clusters are discussed. Throughout, the findings for the native speaker consultant's dialect are compared to the three other dialects documented in the literature: Moulmein Sgaw (Jones, 1961), Bassein Sgaw (Jones, 1961), and Yangon Sgaw (Lar, 2001).

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