The subject of this doctoral dissertation is to examine and describe the acoustic quality of vowels in regional varieties of the Serbian language. The values of the first three formant frequencies (F1, F2, F3) in the central, most stable part of vowels in both stressed and unstressed syllables were measured using the method of experimental phonetics (acoustic analysis), in the speech processing program PRAAT (version 6.0.14, Boersma– Weenink 2015). As one of the tasks was to determine the influence of quantity on the realization of the acoustic quality of vowels, the duration of vowels was also measured (expressed in milliseconds). The main goal of this study (the influence of accents on the values of formant vowel frequencies, determining the patterns of phonological positions and their influence on formant values, the influence of the consonant environment on the values of formant frequencies, the correlation of the quantity and the acoustic quality of vowels) was to determine in wha...t way the acoustic quality of vowels was realized in relation to different regional origins of speakers. Different phonetic conditions in which this phenomenon was examined were described in the production of male and female participants from four varieties of the Serbian language, which have not been examined so far. The research was conducted in: in Leskovac, Kruševac, Užice and Gornji Milanovac. Contrastive and sociophonetic methods were used to examine similarities and differences in the realization of the acoustic quality and quantity of vowels in relation to the variety, as well as gender differences.
The results showed that in the vowel system of the Serbian language there are certain features that are general, universal and those that are specific (typical) and depend on the regional origin of the participants. The research also showed that in the vowel system of Serbian there are some features that are between general and specific.
This study sought to complete and expand dialect knowledge about the vowel system of Serbian in the direction of examining urban lexicons, as well as to contribute to the phonetic descriptions of formant frequencies and vowel duration in the same experimental conditions. The obtained data will also be important for applied phonetics - sociophonetics and forensic phonetics - because the study highlights the acoustic parameters that can be thought of as regional markers.
