An acoustic study of tense, lax, and glottalized vowels in Chichicastenango K’iche’ (Maya)

Abstract This article presents an acoustic analysis of vowel quality and duration in Chichicastenango K’iche’ (Maya) tense, lax and glottalized vowels through a controlled speech production experiment. The results show that most of the five tense–lax pairs can be distinguished through F1 and F2, with the high and mid lax vowels lower than their tense counterparts and the low lax vowel higher than its tense counterpart. Glottalized high and mid vowels have lax quality while glottalized low vowels have tense quality. The high lax vowels /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ and their glottalized counterparts show a high degree of overlap with surrounding categories and appear to be in process of being lost, though they retain distinct phonological behavior. Glottalized vowels are longer than tense vowels, which are longer than lax vowels. The voice quality of glottalized vowels is highly variable and is influenced by context. Realizations with full closures are almost entirely absent. Neither vowel quality nor voice quality results show clear evidence in favor of either a one-segment or two-segment analysis for glottalized vowels.