An Acoustic Analysis of the Short and Long Vowels in Ekegusii Language

This paper analyzes the vowel lengths of Ekegusii, a Bantu language spoken in southwestern Lake Region of Kenya. Orthographically, the Ekegusii language reveals only five vowels as a, e, i, o, and u. However, pioneering researchers like Guthrie (1948) and Whiteley (1965) have shown that the language has a seven vowel system /a, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u/. These researches and many later researches such as Osinde (1988), Bosire (1993), Cammenga (2002), Nurse and Gerard (2003), and Mecha (2006) among others relied upon impression to identify and describe the vowels. Of recent, however, it has become necessary to use modern scientific acoustic methods of speech analysis to confirm earlier claims about the vowels in the language.  In this research, we used Praat Software (Boersma & Weenink 2010) to identify and analyze the vowel system of Ekegusii. Results indicate that vowel length is distinctive in the language. Since vowel duration is phonemic in the language, then the vowels are fourteen as each short vowel has a corresponding long vowel as revealed in the data of this research