Bilabial Assimilation in Urdu: An Acoustic Analysis
Zafeer Hussain Kiani, Abdul Qadir Khan, Nadeem Haider Bukhari · 2011
There is a difference in the pronunciation and orthographical representation of a word. There are certain phonological processes in languages which govern these variations. This paper gives a brief overview of bilabial assimilation that occurs in Urdu. This phonological process has been identified through an analysis of a set of data from Urdu. It is found that the acoustic properties of the nasal sound before bilabial plosive are more like those of /m/ in VCV context. It shows that Urdu speakers change the alveolar nasal /n/ with bilabial nasal /m/ whenever the alveolar is followed by any of the bilabial plosives, i.e. /p/ and /b/.