Proses Nasalisasi Vokal dan Ciri Akustik Vokal Nasalan

Abstract

A number of Malay scholars have theorized about vowel nasalization in the Malay language, including disccussions on (i) progressive nasalization: V → Ṽ/[+nasal] ____, and (ii) regressive nasalization: V → Ṽ/____ [+nasal]. This paper aims to review these formulae and identify the acoustic characteristics of nasalized vowels of Malay in an empirical manner, using an experimental phonetic method, i.e. computerized acoustic analysis. This experiment focused on words that contain the phoneme combination -VCV or -VCCV as /-iŋi/ or /-iŋɡi/ that follows oral consonants. The analysis resulting from a certain number of experimental data proves that the nasalized vowels visually demonstrate a feature of nasality on the spectrogram, namely the high-frequency components scattered on the formant band above approximately 7,000Hz. A combination of phonemes /iŋi/ in a word mengelilingi /məŋəliliŋi/, for example, shows nasalization in the phonetic form [i ĩg̃ĩ ŋg ̃ĩ̃]. From the analysis, it can be concluded that vowel nasalization occurs when an oral vowel is preceded or followed by a nasal consonant in a string of speech, and goes through a complex process unlike what has been formulated in the previous literature. The present researcher has made a sketch of this result but has not devised a new formula.

Keywords: frequency components, nasal assimilation, nasalized consonants, nasalization, nasalized vowel, transitory sounds