Uvular Consonant in Standard Persian

This study presents an acoustic analysis of uvular consonant in Standard Contemporary Persian. SCP is the official language of Iran, the variety spoken by educated people in Tehran and in the media. The total data set comprises seven hundred and ninety two items from the repetition of twenty four single meaningful words of Persian produced in laboratory conditions by native-speaker subjects. Acoustic analyses were made from related waveforms and spectrograms. Measurements underwent descriptive statistical analysis. Results of the study provided evidence for manner of articulation and voicing category of uvular consonant in initial, intervocalic and final positions. It was indicated that in essence, the uvular consonant is a voiced stop which is transcribed as /ɢ/ in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Generally it appears as a voiced fricative or sonorant consonant in intervocalic position transcribed as [ʁ]. This allophonic variation can be regarded as a phonological weakening phenomenon.