Hindustani phonology


is the lingua franca of northern India and Pakistan, and through its two standardized registers, Hindi and Urdu, a co-official language of India and co-official and national language of Pakistan respectively. Phonological differences between the two standards are minimal.

Vowels

Hindustani natively possesses a symmetrical ten-vowel system. The vowels are always short in length, while the vowels,,,,,, are always considered long, in addition to an eleventh vowel which is found in English loanwords.

Vowel

Schwa is a short vowel which vanishes to nothing at unstressed position. is often realized more open than mid, i.e. as near-open.

Vowel

The open central vowel is transcribed in IPA by either or.

Vowels , ,

Among the close vowels, what in Sanskrit are thought to have been primarily distinctions of vowel length, have become in Hindustani distinctions of quality, or length accompanied by quality. The historical opposition of length in the close vowels has been neutralized in word-final position, for example Sanskrit loans śakti and vastu are and, not * and *.

Vowels ,

The vowel represented graphically as ऐ – has been variously transcribed as or. Among sources for this article,, pictured to the right, uses, while and use. Furthermore, an eleventh vowel is found in English loanwords, such as . Hereafter, ऐ – will be represented as to distinguish it from, the latter. Despite this, the Hindustani vowel system is quite similar to that of English, in contrast to the consonants.
In addition, occurs as a conditioned allophone of in proximity to, if and only if the is surrounded on both sides by two schwas. and is realised as separate vowel. For example, in kahanā , the is surrounded on both sides by schwa, hence both the schwas will become fronted to short, giving the pronunciation. Syncopation of phonemic middle schwa can further occur to give. The fronting also occurs in word-final, presumably because a lone consonant carries an unpronounced schwa. Hence, kaha! becomes in actual pronunciation. However, the fronting of schwa does not occur in words with a schwa only on one side of the such as kahānī or bāhar .

Vowels ,

The vowel occurs in proximity to if the is surrounded by one of the sides by a schwa and on other side by a round vowel. It differs from the vowel in that it is a short vowel. For example, in bahut the is surrounded on one side by a schwa and a round vowel on the other side. One or both of the schwas will become giving the pronunciation.

Nasalization of vowels

As in French and Portuguese, there are nasalized vowels in Hindustani. There is disagreement over the issue of the nature of nasalization. presents four differing viewpoints:
  1. there are no and, possibly because of the effect of nasalization on vowel quality;
  2. there is phonemic nasalization of all vowels;
  3. all vowel nasalization is predictable ;
  4. Nasalized long vowel phonemes occur word-finally and before voiceless stops; instances of nasalized short vowels and of nasalized long vowels before voiced stops are allophonic.
Masica supports this last view.

Consonants

Hindustani has a core set of 28 consonants inherited from earlier Indo-Aryan. Supplementing these are two consonants that are internal developments in specific word-medial contexts, and seven consonants originally found in loan words, whose expression is dependent on factors such as status and cultural register.
Most native consonants may occur geminate. Geminate consonants are always medial and preceded by one of the interior vowels. They all occur monomorphemically except, which occurs only in a few Sanskrit loans where a morpheme boundary could be posited in between, e.g. for niśśīl .
For the English speaker, a notable feature of the Hindustani consonants is that there is a four-way distinction of phonation among plosives, rather than the two-way distinction found in English. The phonations are:
  1. tenuis, as, which is like in English spin
  2. voiced, as, which is like in English bin
  3. aspirated, as, which is like in English pin, and
  4. murmured, as.
The last is commonly called "voiced aspirate", though notes that,
"Evidence from experimental phonetics, however, has demonstrated that the two types of sounds involve two distinct types of voicing and release mechanisms. The series of so-called voice aspirates should now properly be considered to involve the voicing mechanism of murmur, in which the air flow passes through an aperture between the arytenoid cartilages, as opposed to passing between the ligamental vocal bands."

The murmured consonants are believed to be a reflex of murmured consonants in Proto-Indo-European, a phonation that is absent in all branches of the Indo-European family except Indo-Aryan and Armenian.
; Notes
Stops in final position are not released. varies freely with, and can also be pronounced. is essentially a trill. In intervocalic position, it may have a single contact and be described as a flap, but it may also be a clear trill, especially in word-initial and syllable-final positions, and geminate is always a trill in Arabic and Persian loanwords, e.g. zarā versus well-trilled zarrā . The palatal and velar nasals occur only in consonant clusters, where each nasal is followed by a homorganic stop, as an allophone of a nasal vowel followed by a stop, and in Sanskrit loanwords. There are murmured sonorants,, but these are considered to be consonant clusters with in the analysis adopted by.
The fricative in Hindustani is typically voiced, especially when surrounded by vowels, but there is no phonemic difference between this voiced fricative and its voiceless counterpart .
Hindustani also has a phonemic difference between the dental plosives and the so-called retroflex plosives. The dental plosives in Hindustani are laminal-denti alveolar as in Spanish, and the tongue-tip must be well in contact with the back of the upper front teeth. The retroflex series is not purely retroflex; it actually has an apico-postalveolar articulation, and sometimes in words such as ṭūṭā it even becomes alveolar.
In some Indo-Aryan languages, the plosives and the flaps are allophones in complementary distribution, with the former occurring in initial, geminate and postnasal positions and the latter occurring in intervocalic and final positions. However, in Standard Hindi they contrast in similar positions, as in nīṛaj vs niḍar.

Allophony of and

and are allophones in Hindustani. These are distinct phonemes in English, but both are allophones of the phoneme in Hindustani, including loanwords of Arabic and Persian origin. More specifically, they are conditional allophones, i.e. rules apply on whether is pronounced as or depending on context. Native Hindi speakers pronounce as in vrat and in pakwān, treating them as a single phoneme and without being aware of the allophonic distinctions, though these are apparent to native English speakers. The rule is that the consonant is pronounced as semivowel in onglide position, i.e. between an onset consonant and a following vowel.
However, the allophone phenomenon becomes obvious when speakers switch languages. When speakers of other languages that have a distinction between and speak Hindustani, they might pronounce in vrat as, i.e. as instead of the correct. This results in an intelligibility problem because can easily be confused for aurat , which means "woman" instead of "vow" in Hindustani. Similarly, Hindustani speakers might unconsciously apply their native allophony rules to English words, pronouncing war as or advance as, which can result in intelligibility problems with native English speakers.
In some situations, the allophony is non-conditional, i.e. the speaker can choose, or an intermediate sound based on personal habit and preference, and still be perfectly intelligible, as long as the meaning is constant. This includes words such as advait which can be pronounced equally correctly as or.

External borrowing

Loanwords from Sanskrit reintroduced into formal Modern Standard Hindi. In casual speech it is usually replaced by. It does not occur initially and has a nasalized flap as a common allophone.
Loanwords from Persian introduced six consonants,. Being Persian in origin, these are seen as a defining feature of Urdu, although these sounds officially exist in Hindi and modified Devanagari characters are available to represent them. Among these,, also found in English and Portuguese loanwords, are now considered well-established in Hindi; indeed, appears to be encroaching upon and replacing even in native Hindi words as well as many other Indian languages such as Bengali, Gujarati and Marathi, as happened in Greek with phi. This to shift also occasionally occurs in Urdu. While is a foreign sound, it is also natively found as an allophone of /s/ beside voiced consonants.
The other three Persian loans,, are still considered to fall under the domain of Urdu, and are also used by many Hindi speakers; however, some Hindi speakers assimilate these sounds to respectively. The sibilant is found in loanwords from all sources and is well-established. The failure to maintain by some Hindi speakers is considered nonstandard. Yet these same speakers, having a Sanskritic education, may hyperformally uphold and Voiceless_retroflex_sibilant|. In contrast, for native speakers of Urdu, the maintenance of is not commensurate with education and sophistication, but is characteristic of all social levels. The sibliant is very rare and is found in loanwords from Persian, Portuguese, and English and is considered to fall under the domain of Urdu and although it is officially present in Hindi, many speakers of Hindi assimilate it to or.
Being the main sources from which Hindustani draws its higher, learned terms– English, Sanskrit, Arabic, and to a lesser extent Persian provide loanwords with a rich array of consonant clusters. The introduction of these clusters into the language contravenes a historical tendency within its native core vocabulary to eliminate clusters through processes such as cluster reduction and epenthesis. lists distinctively Sanskrit/Hindi biconsonantal clusters of initial and final, and distinctively Perso-Arabic/Urdu biconsonantal clusters of final.

Suprasegmental features

Hindustani has a stress accent, but it is not as important as in English. To predict stress placement, the concept of syllable weight is needed:
Stress is on the heaviest syllable of the word, and in the event of a tie, on the last such syllable. If all syllables are light, the penultimate is stressed. However, the final mora of the word is ignored when making this assignment . For example, with the ignored mora in parentheses:
Content words in Hindustani normally begin on a low pitch, followed by a rise in pitch. Strictly speaking, Hindustani, like most other Indian languages, is rather a syllable-timed language. The schwa has a strong tendency to vanish into nothing if its syllable is unaccented.