Linguistically-motivated automatic classification of regional French varieties

The goal of this study is to automatically differentiate French varieties (standard French and French varieties spoken in the South of France, Alsace, Belgium and Switzerland) by applying a linguistically-motivated approach. We took advantage of automatic phoneme alignment to measure vowel formants, consonant (de)voicing, pronunciation variants as well as prosodic cues. These features were then used to identify French varieties by applying classification techniques. On large corpora of hundreds of speakers, over 80% correct identification scores were obtained. The confusions between varieties and the features used (by decision trees) are linguistically grounded.