Places and Manner of Articulation of Bangla Consonants: A EPG Based Study

Bangla phoneme inventory consists of 32 consonants out of those 16 are stop or plosive and 4 are affricate. This paper presents the detailed investigation of place and manner of articulation of Bengali phonemes. The place of articulation study of consonants is based on Electropalatography (EPG) system and the manner of articulation study is based on acoustic study of large number of well-spoken Bengali VCV sequences in which V represents the seven Bangla vowels /u/, /o/, / /, /a/, /æ/, /e/ and /i/ while C represents all the consonants of Bangla. The study shows that in case of Bangla language plosives have three distinct places of articulation namely dental, alveolar and post alveolar and four manner of articulation.