International Conference on Linguistic Research and Applications

Abstract
Vlach is a spoken-only language and has been recorded as endangered, lacking a unified written system (Beis &
Dasulas, 2017). Studies conducted on Vlach have been mostly descriptive, with very few focusing on phonology
(Dinas, 1987; Beis, 2000) or phonetics (Vrazitulis, 2023). Though the vowel system of the Vlach language is
commonly reported to contain seven vowels (/i, e, a, o, u, ə, ɨ/), the Farsherot dialect (part of which is the
Rimenian variety) does not contain the central high vowel /ɨ/ (Caragiu-Marioţeanu, 1968). The present paper
investigates acoustic properties of the vowels of the Rimenian variety of Kefalovryso (Pogoni prefecture,
Epirus) which, to our knowledge, has never been studied experimentally, in order to provide an acoustic
description of its vowel space and to explore the status of the central vowels in this variety. We additionally
compare the acoustic properties of Rimenian vowels with those of Greek, identifying areas of overlap and
divergence that may bear on phonological categorization and language contact.
On the basis of linguistic profiling, the community can be characterized as Greek-dominant bilingual, with
Vlach maintained as a regularly used secondary language. For the purpose of this study ten bilingual speakers
of Kefalovryso (five male, five female) were recorded producing Greek and Vlach vowels in directed speech.
The material consisted of carefully selected Greek and Vlach words with CV1CV2 syllabic structure, all stressed
on the first syllable. The first consonant was bilabial and the second bilabial or alveolar. F1 and F2
measurements were made with Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2025) and were subsequently normalized using the
Lobanov method in NORM (Thomas & Kental, 2007). Absolute and normalized vowel duration measurements
were also conducted. A Linear Mixed Model in SPSS was employed to locate differences between the two vowel
systems according to language and gender.
Preliminary results indicate that Rimenian vowels /o/ and /u/ are realized in a more open and front
position relative to their Greek counterparts. Further comparisons among the Rimenian vowels showed that
the centrals /ə/ and /ɨ/ are acoustically close to /a/ and /e/ respectively, suggesting substantial overlap in the
acoustic space. These patterns, along with additional findings, will be discussed in light of linguistic contact
between Rimenian and Greek