Northeastern Thai tonal variations in Five Sisaket speech communities

Abstract

This article shows the results of a research on Northeastern Thai tones spoken in five types of speech communities of Sisaket province; Northeastern Thai, Northeastern Thai-Kui, Northeastern Thai-Khmer, Northeastern Thai-Kui-Khmer, and Multilingual community. The objectives of the study are to analyze and compare the tone systems and tonal characteristics of the Northeastern Thai language spoken in the previously mentioned communities. The hypothesis is that the tone systems used in all five communities are the same but the tonal characteristics are different. The data was collected from three female participants who speak Northeastern Thai as their mother tongue, in each community, 15 participants in total. Each individual has lived in the community for at least 10 years. There are two parts to the data collection. The first part, which is for the auditory analysis, was done by applying Gedney’s (1972) tonebox method. The second part was for the tonal characteristic analysis. A list of 20 minimal pairs was used during the recording. Later the data was analyzed by using Praat version 5.3.35. For the results presentation, the fundamental frequency was converted into semitone in order to reduce the effects of physical variants of the participants such as body build, age, etc.

The research results show that the Northeastern Thai speakers in every community use the same tone system which is a five-tone system. Differences are found in the tonal characteristics, especially those of tone 2 (high-falling) and tone 5 (low-falling). Also, the pitch range of tones used in the five communities where two and three languages are spoken is clearly narrower than the one used in a monolingual community.