Acoustic Realization of /S/ Across Accents of Urdu

This study investigates acoustic characteristics that distinguish three Urdu accents spoken predominantly in Punjab: Pothowari, Multani, and Jhangochi. We examined four spectral moments—center of gravity (CoG), standard deviation (SD), skewness, and kurtosis—of the fricative /s/ to identify acoustic variations between these accents. 1200 /s/ tokens were annotated from a spontaneous speech corpus, focusing on 10 speakers per accent (5 male, 5 female), with 40 tokens per speaker. The results reveal distinct ordering of accents by CoG values, along with notable patterns in SD, skewness, and kurtosis, offering deeper insight into accent-based differences. Additionally, our findings demonstrate gender-specific changes in the energy trajectories of the fricative within each accent. These findings contribute to a better understanding of Urdu's phonetic diversity and have broader implications for speech processing, sociolinguistics, and practical applications such as accent recognition in speech technologies.