2025P Vowel systems of Standard and Kudar varieties of Iron Ossetic

Ossetic (< Iranian < IE) is a language spoken in the Caucasian region by circa 576,000 people, the majority of which are native speakers of its Iron dialect (Belyaev, 2021). This dialect is itself subject to regional variation, with Standard Iron having received the most thorough linguistic description (e.g. Dzakhova, 2009). To date, the research concerning the vowel phonemes of another Iron variety, Kudar, has been based exclusively on perception and mainly centered on the peculiarities of their realisation word-initially and in vowel-glide sequences (see e.g. Bekoev, 1985, pp. 178–182) rather than the differences in quality exhibited by the prototypical allophones of Standard and Kudar Iron, despite such differences being noticeable for native speakers.

This study was aimed at investigating the acoustics of vowels of Kudar and Standard Iron using a uniform questionnaire that consisted of monosyllabic words featuring all of the vowels between coronal consonants and disyllabic words with the same vowel phonemes within each word, allowing for quality assessment in regard to stress. The data were collected in Vladikavkaz (North Ossetia, Russia) in 2024 and 2025 from 4 speakers of Standard Iron and 6 speakers of Kudar Iron.

The main differences between the two systems were found to lie in mid vowel subsystems, with /ɜ/ and /a/ being subject to greater variability and /ɜ/ being realized as a higher and more retracted vowel in Standard Iron.

Figure 1: see attachment

References

Bekoev, D. G. (1985). Ironskiy dialekt osetinskogo yazyka [Iron Dialect of the Ossetic Language]. Iryston.
Belyaev, O. I. (2021, April). Kontaktno-obuslovlennye yavleniya v osetinskom yazyke [Contact-Indused Phenomena in the Ossetic Language]. https://iling-ran.ru/workshops/210304_belyaev_handout.pdf
Dzakhova, V. T. (2009). Foneticheskie markery udareniya v osetinskom yazyke (v sopostavlenii s nemetskim) [Phonetic Markers of Stress in Ossetian (in Comparison with German)]. Slovo i Tekst: Kommunikativnyy, Lingvokul’turnyy i Istoricheskiy Aspekty: Materialy Mezhdunarodnoy Nauchnoy Konferentsii [Word and Text: Communicative, Linguocultural, and Historical Aspects: Proceedings of an International Scientific Conference].