Identifying Dialects of German from Digit Strings

At Eurospeech 97 we presented a perception experiment on identifying regional variants of High German from digit strings in telephone speech (Draxler, Burger 1997). This experiment has been modified as follows: i) use of high quality speech recordings from the RVG1 (Burger, Schiel, 1998) corpus instead of SpeechDat telephone speech, ii) a geographically precise dialect determination of the speaker by an expert, and iii) a clickable map instead of a popup menu for the region classification. 46 utterances (one male and one female speaker for each dialect region) of telephone number digit strings were selected by a dialect expert. 39 test persons from 10 dialect regions classified all 46 utterances via the WWW. From these classifications, a confusion matrix was computed. The main results are that for the entire German dialects region Swiss German, Austrian, and Saxonian were identified best. Within Germany, the Saxonian, Bavarian, and Svabian dialects were recognized best. These findings basically conform with the results from the previous experiment.