We adopt automatic language recognition methods to study dialect levelling — a phenomenon that leads to reduced structural differences among dialects in a given spoken language. In terms of dialect characterisation, levelling is a nuisance variable that adversely affects recognition accuracy: the more similar two dialects are, the harder it is to set them apart. We address levelling in Finnish ...

The Continental West Germanic Languages include the standard varieties of Dutch, Frisian, and High German, as well as a large number of non-standard varieties, the more familiar of which are the dialects spoken in Belgium and the South of the Netherlands (Flemish, Brabantish, Limburgian), Northern Germany (Low German), the Rhine Valley (Luxemburgish), South-Eastern Germany and Austria (e.g. Bav...

Arabic dialects do not just share a common koiné, but there are shared pandialectal linguistic phenomena that allow computational models for dialects to learn from each other. In this paper we build a unified segmentation model where the training data for different dialects are combined and a single model is trained. The model yields higher accuracies than dialect-specific models, eliminating t...

Various phonographic variants of script, both for Chinese and the neighboring languages using characters, had been created long before contacts with West appearance any Romanization systems in region. Two official alphabets, ʼPhags-pa Yìsītìfēi (Istīfā) scripts, likely nonofficial Arabographic Xi ˇа ojī ng writing system were introduced language already period Mongol Yuan dynasty. A syllabic ch...

This is apreliminary report on the phonetic interaction of tone and consonant voicing in K m u , a language where some dialects use Fo for producing distinctive word tones, while others do not have tones but rely on the contrastive voicing of initial consonants to distinguish words which tonal dialects distinguishes with tones. Speakers of non-tonal dialects produce no significant Fo diflerence...

Previous studies on the perception of language prosody and dialectal prosody have shown that languages and regional dialects can be identified by prosodic cues alone. This pilot study tests this for 4 Swiss German dialects. 70 subjects are presented with filtered speech material, devoid of segmental cues. The filter was applied for frequencies between 250 Hz7000 Hz. Despite this filtering, 3 of...

This thematic issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language addresses the question of whether dialects in western Europe are dying. Can dialects still be a medium of communication in our industrialized and increasingly urbanized societies? Is there a place for dialects in a globalizing world? And what kind of dialect do we speak right now and shall we be speaking in the near f...

This thesis has two aims: developing resources for Arabic dialects and improving the speech recognition of Arabic dialects. Two important components are considered: Pronunciation Dictionary (PD) and Language Model (LM). Six parts are involved, which relate to finding and evaluating dialects resources and improving the performance of systems for the speech recognition of dialects. Three resource...