ABSTRACT
The chapter explores phonological variations exhibited by Bengali adults living in Dhaka (the capital of Bangladesh) in their attempt to use the Bangla language efficiently. A variationist approach has been applied to identify potential segmental patterns of the Bangla phonology which can vary in different sociolinguistic settings. The study intends to explain how the sociolinguistic conditioning of Bangla phonological traits, such as voicing assimilation, spirantisation, gemination, and others, occurs in Bangladeshi native settings of standard colloquial Bangla (SCB) and its variants in Bangladesh. The investigation has deployed a corpus-based approach as the methodological guideline and correlated the conventional data organisation strategy with it. In this framework, an open-source Bangla speech corpus of 1,06,860 words has been handled to ensure spontaneous responses to contextual variations. The data analysis framework is guided by three socio-phonological parameters; these are segmental interactions, phonemic regularity and dialect convergence. These parameters have been analysed explicitly to account for the articulatory variations in SCB.
