A Study on the Vowel System Universals of Southeast Asian Languages: The Cases of Tagalog, Malay and Thai.

Heo Yong

doi:10.21049/ccs.2017.48..391

Southeast Asian languages are famous for having a large number of vowel sounds with an average of more than 20 vowel sounds in this certain language family. In addition, there are approximately 1,500 languages in this area, which accounts for approximately 20% of total languages in the world. For this reason, vowel systems of Southeast Asian languages should be explored to determine the nature of vowel structures of human natural languages. In this study, we analyze vowel systems of three languages, Tagalog, Malay and Thai, that have only primary or normal vowels and thus are relatively simple structures based on descriptive and analytic universals. We would also like to confirm if the six criteria of the tentative evaluation model taken from several previous literature is appropriate in applying analysis of vowel system universals under the method of the Greenbergian Universals or statistic universals. What we have found from this research are (i) the three languages have high level of universals with some exceptional cases such as three-vowel system of Tagalog, and (ii) some of the six criteria, together with some cases of analytic universals, are not quite suitable for understanding language-specific universals that are different from other languages. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)

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