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Another Look at the Tagalog Consonant Clusters

Kenichiro Kurusu
Volume
53
Issue
NA
Pages
-
69
87
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Date of publication:

December 31, 2022

In Tagalog, consonant clusters are phonologically allowed and mainly found in loanwords from Spanish and English. However, their phonetic realization has not yet been studied while previous studies (Colantoni and Steele 2005; Kilpatrick et.al. 2006; Ramírez 2006) reported that a svarabhakti vowel has been observed between consonant clusters in Spanish and French. Thus, this research note claims that a svarabhakti vowel also occurs between consonant clusters in Tagalog based on an initial acoustic analysis conducted by Kurusu (2022a, 2022b). Although this is consistent with the findings of earlier works, not much has been said about its characteristics. Therefore, finally, this research note presents issues which should be studied in the future: (1) the phonetic environment where a svarabhakti vowel appears in Tagalog; (2) perception of a svarabhakti vowel by speakers, and; (3) universality of a svarabhakti vowel that appears between consonant clusters among languages in the world.

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