Production of chittagonian geminates

This paper investigates the production of medial geminates in Chittagonian Bangla, a dialect of Bangla/Bengali, to determine the durational differences of the geminate-singleton contrast. We also aim to discover whether there is any interaction with voicing, place, and manner on singleton and geminate duration. Chittagonian Bangla is a distinct variety of Bangla, mainly spoken in Chittagong division in Bangladesh. In this study, a wordlist of 22 true medial singleton and geminate pair wordlist was prepared, selecting stops, nasals, and laterals from four places of articulation (bilabial, alveolar, retroflex, velar); the stops included voiced and voiceless pairs. Data were recorded from two Chittagonian native participants (age 27) who were PhD students at a southeastern university in the USA. Praat was used to calculate the speech duration, and R was used for the statistical analysis and plotting. The singleton-geminate pairs showed a statistically significant difference in terms of duration. Voicing is a statistically significant factor in determining the ratio between geminate and singleton pairs, while of the places, only retroflex was a statistically significant factor. We compare our results to standard Bangla (Islam, 2016) and other languages with geminates (Al-Deaibes & Jarrah, 2023).