Vowels and tones in Poula

Abstract

This paper presents a sketch of the vowels and tones in the Poula language as spoken in the Naamai (Koide) village of Manipur. Acoustic studies on the vowels and tones are conducted in this work, and it is concluded that Poula has a six vowel inventory like many of the languages in the vicinity; however the distribution of vowels in Poula is quite peculiar, with the absence of high back vowels and presence of two high front vowels. In case of tones, this study reports four tones in Poula, namely, High-falling, Rising-falling, Mid and Low. The paper concludes with a short discussion on tones in Poula underived words.