PHONEME FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE IN EVENKI: A PILOT STUDY

The current paper aimed at studying the 2 types of frequency of occurrence of phoneme groups and in some phoneme pairs - in the Evenki phonological system and speech. The results of the analysis of speech samples obtained from 4 Evenki subjects showed that there are objective grounds to consider this language as highly vocalic. These are notably higher frequencies of occurrence of vocalic sounds (vowels + sonorants) compared to obstruents both in the system and speech. Evenki is more vocalic than English and Russian and less vocalic than Yakut as far as system frequency of occurrence. This tendency is even better expressed in speech for Evenki, English and Russian. As far as there are no data on Yakut phoneme objective frequency, this comparison is a matter of further study. For both sonorants and obstruents, system and objective frequency showed similar tendencies: prevailing of stops over fricatives, nasals over approximants, fore-lingual consonants over ones of other loci...