Malaysian English: An Instrumental Analysis of Vowel Contrasts.

This paper makes an instrumental analysis of English vowel monophthongs produced by 47 female Malaysian speakers. The focus is on the distribution of Malaysian English vowels in the vowel space, and the extent to which there is phonetic contrast between traditionally paired vowels. The results indicate that, like neighbouring varieties of English, Malaysian English vowels occupy a smaller vowel space than those of British English. The lack of contrast in vowel quality between vowel pairs was more apparent for /i… /-/ I/, /e/ - /ae/ and /O /-/ A…/. However, there was a considerable difference in duration in the vowel pairs except for /A /-/ O…/ which contrasted in terms of vowel quality.