Pitch pattern in Tabrizi dialect of Azerbaijan Turkish: The case of interrogative sentences

Turkish language, which belongs to the Ural-Altaic language family, has various dialects and accents, from among which Tabrizi dialect is the variety used by people of Tabriz, the capital city of East Azerbaijan province, located in the northwest of Iran. The aim of the present study was to study the pitch pattern of interrogative sentences produced in unmarked contexts by Tabrizi speakers. To do this, we selected more than 100 utterances from among daily conversations collected through voice recording and then, we acquired the main data through recording the voices of speakers saying those utterances in laboratory setting. The obtained voices were labeled and analyzed using PRAAT software based on Pier Humbert’s framework and the ToBI model. Our results showed the intonation pattern in standard interrogative utterances to be H*L-L%.