Estudio acústico de las consonantes de la lengua yagua

Abstract

This research presents an acoustic description of the consonant sounds of the yagua language, an isolated language belonging to the Peba-yagua family which is spoken in the northeastern region of Peru. The number of people in the current yagua society amounts to approximately 5,679. The population is distributed mainly in the provinces of Mariscal Ramon Castilla, Putumayo, and Maynas in the department of Loreto, mainly in the border areas with Colombia and Brazil. The objective of this study was to establish the number of consonants in the Yagua language and detail their acoustic properties. On the basis of acoustic phonetics and after an agreement with the Yagua collaborators to carry out interviews to them in order to obtain this data for the investigation, a set of 200 words was elicited from 9 speakers from the Amazon River communities. Subsequently, the recordings were processed using the Praat computer program, which made it possible to recognize the acoustic characteristics of the sounds of the Yagua language. Among the most noteworthy results, it has been possible to determine the existence of 20 consonant sounds in the Yagua language: [p], [p(w)], [t], [k], [m], [m(w)], [(m)b], [n], [(sic)], [(n)d], [t(sic)], [s], [integral], [r], [f], [(sic)], [w], [beta], [j] and [h].