The idea for IndoPhon was born out of a realisation, one not new or unknown, that speech-related research in Indian linguistics lacked a formal community dedicated to its development and dissemination to wider audiences within and outside India. The current global crisis provided some impetus to transform this idea into a reality: Given the limited resources, lack of access to data, and funding issues during the pandemic, how do we approach laboratory research in the present and foreseeable future in a fully online or part online/part offline mode? In addition, what would be the ethical bounds of repurposing already collected acoustic and perception data? How might we explore non laboratory/non field alternatives to conventional data elicitation?
Although some of the questions above arise from our present circumstances, one of the long term goals of IndoPhon is to initiate, foster, and furthermore diverse conversations within Phonetics and Phonology in India and beyond. At the moment, we are a small working group of phoneticians and phonologists based in India but we hope to build a pan-India collective of speech-related researchers/teachers to form strong networks with similar individuals, groups, and labs around the globe. The inaugural series of IndoPhon, therefore, reflects both our diverse interests within phonetics and phonology and also our goal to bring together students, researchers, and faculty interested in phonetics and phonology.
The interactive series will address most of the important areas in speech research - from a historical overview of phonetics and phonology challenging some of the basic concepts and inherent assumptions to examining the complex relationship between phonetics and phonology, from segmental to prosodic, from phonological development to phonological variation. The talk series will feature a stellar line-up of experts in the field, starting with Sameer ud Dowla Khan who will talk about a South Asian model for intonational analysis and ending with Paul Foulkes who will talk about the sociophonetics of L1 acquisition. In between, K.P. Mohanan and Tara Mohanan will speak on leading ideas in research on theoretical phonology and phonetics, from a historical perspective. Preeti Rao will talk about prosodic cues in oral reading skills, Laura McPherson will deliver a talk on segmental features of grammatical tones, Vijay D’Souza will present a talk on segmental properties in Hruso Aka, and Jennifer Cole on perceptual correlates of prosody. The IndoPhon talk series will also feature talks by Jim Scobbie on interlocking perspectives on Phonologies and Phonetics, by Ghada Khattab on the role of variability in monolingual and bilingual phonological development, and by Binny Abraham on the acoustic correlates of Muḍuga vowels.
We sincerely hope that the IndoPhon talks will be able to provide an impetus to the phonetics & phonology research landscape in India and will invigorate a vibrant speech research community.
