A Comparative Analysis of the Vowel Systems of Some Slavic Languages Through Dispersion Theory

This article attempts to investigate comparatively the vowel systems of Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Czech and Slovak through vowel dispersion theory (DT). The results show that only Belarusian does not violate DT, but the other languages violate this theory in two ways: Russian and Polish have the vowel /ɨ/, and Ukrainian has the vowel /ɪ/; Czech and Slovak formed short and long vowels in the same vowel space. The vowel prioritisation of these languages is not in line with Maddieson (1984) and Lindblom (1990).