Abstract
The Shona language belongs to the Bantu languages and is spoken in most parts of Zimbabwe. The Zezuru dialect is spoken in the area around Harare. The velarized consonant is said to be a consonant with an extreme raising of the back of the tongue. In this article, the articulation of the first consonant is called the first articulation; and the articulation accompanying the raising of the back of the tongue, the second articulation. In the Zezuru dialect, the velarized consonants are opposed to non-velarized ones, and they have a stop, an affricate, a fricative or an approximant as the first articulation. In this article, the velarized consonants with the first articulation of a stop or an affricate are dealt with. Some acoustic characteristics of velarized consonants are analyzed in contrast with non-velarized ones using a sound-spectrograph. In the analysis, characteristics of the first articulation are compared with those of non-velarized consonant articulation, and those of the second articulation with those of the non-velarized /k, g/. As a result, these velarized consonants are characterized by a low F2 and its rising transition, as shown in Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996). Furthermore, it should be noted that the velarized consonants in this dialect have two closures like a consonant cluster, i.e., the closure of the first articulation and that of the second articulation in most types. However, when the first articulation is a velar stop, there is only one closure, like a double articulated consonant, e.g., /pk/. Finally, the manners and their acoustic characteristics are discussed from the viewpoint of perturbation theory proposed by Öhman (1967).
