Mapping areal variation and majority language influence in North Sámi using hierarchical prosodic analysis

This paper presents the results of a statistical hierarchical analysis of areal variation in prosody of North Sámi language. The hierarchical analysis method compares unigram models using cross-entropy measure. The models depict distributions of Δ-features of f0 and energy signals decomposed using Continuous Wavelet Transform [1]. These signals are obtained from speech recordings of five areal North Sámi varieties recorded in sites in Northern Finland and Norway (the Finnmark area) [2, 3]. As the used method does not require any extensive labeling or annotating, the method is especially suitable for under-resourced languages with limited speech material.