The goal of this presentation is to investigate Malayalam affricates articulation by some Malayalam speakers of the Southern variety. Static (direct) palatography and linguogrqphy methods are used for our articulatory data.
Part of an on-going research on Malayalam affricates, we are presenting preliminary results from three speakers. We wanted to determine whether different laryngeal types such as voiced, voiceless aspirated and voiceless unaspirated affricates [dʒ tʃh tʃ] share the same place of articulation (we did not find any example of voiced aspirated affricates). We equally wanted to determine whether there was any co-articulation effect while producing affricates in three different vocalic contexts, i.e. /i/, /a/ and /u/.
Contrary to the general claim which defines Malayalam affricates as palatal, i.e. posterior, our speakers produced all studied consonants systematically more anterior, mostly around the alveolar region. No palatal productions were observed during our experiment.