An Acoustical Study of Brôu Vowels

Brôu is a language of the Mon-Khmer language family spoken in the northwest corner of South Viet Nam and in neighboring areas of North Viet Nam and Laos. Like a number of other Mon-Khmer languages, it contains a high incidence of phonemic vowel nuclei. Forty-one such nuclei have been postulated for Brou in a previous study by Phillips, Miller and Miller. In that study, the authors state that the Brôu vowel system lends itself to several possible phonemic descriptions. Four of these possibilities are presented in that paper, and the strong and weak points of each description are noted. The purpose of this paper is to discover and describe some of the acoustic correlates of the Brôu vowels. The paper will review the findings of the previous study and will attempt to correlate these with the acoustical study which comprises the main body of the paper. The paper concerns itself with the broad overall view of the Brôu vowel system rather than the exhaustive treatment of any one aspect of it.