Prosodic Markers of Prestige and Power in Academic vs. Non-Academic Speakers: A Mixed-Method Socio-phonetic Study

Abstract

Prosody functions as a powerful yet often under examined resource in the construction of institutional authority and social prestige. While sociolinguistic research has traditionally emphasized segmental variation, emerging work in sociophonetics highlights the socially indexical role of suprasegmental features such as pitch range, boundary tones, rhythm, and speech rate. This mixed-method sociophonetic study investigates how prosodic markers differentiate academic and non-academic speakers in multilingual Pakistani contexts. Drawing on Labovian variationist sociolinguistics, indexicality theory, and Bourdieu’s notion of linguistic capital, the study analyzes speech samples from forty bilingual Urdu–English speakers across formal and semi-formal communicative settings. Acoustic measurements were conducted using Praat to examine fundamental frequency (F0), pitch range, boundary tone realization, speech rate, pause duration, and rhythmic variability. The findings reveal systematic prosodic differences between groups. Academic speakers consistently demonstrate wider pitch range, controlled falling boundary tones in declaratives, faster yet regulated speech rate, and shorter hesitation pauses. In contrast, non-academic speakers exhibit narrower pitch ranges, higher frequency of rising declaratives, longer pauses, and greater rhythmic fluctuation. These patterns remain consistent across both English and Urdu discourse, suggesting that institutional prestige prosody operates beyond language-specific phonological systems. The study argues that prosodic moderation and boundary control function as audible indices of epistemic authority and embodied linguistic capital. By foregrounding Pakistani multilingual speech within socioprosodic scholarship, this research contributes empirical evidence that prestige and power are not only lexically articulated but acoustically constructed.