This paper attempts to establish the importance of differences in the tone inventories for the mutual intelligibility of 15 Chinese dialects. Tone influence for mutual intelligibility was tested in two studies. In the first study mutual intelligibility was measured through opinion testing. The fable “The North Wind and the Sun” was read by one male speaker in each of 15 Chinese dialects with me...

Han Chinese experienced substantial population migrations and admixture in history, yet little is known about the evolutionary process of Chinese dialects. Here, we used phylogenetic approaches and admixture inference to explicitly decompose the underlying structure of the diversity of Chinese dialects, based on the total phoneme inventories of 140 dialect samples from seven traditional dialect...

Orderly phonetic correspondence with Middle Chinese are found in Chinese dialects, such as Hakka, Min, and Yue, yet their phonological structure reflect traces of linguistic substrate or language contact. Contrastive phonetic analyses on Hakka, She, and Yao are the focus of this paper, historical evolution and language contact within are also attempted. The aims are to study, analyze and compar...

This research seeks to establish an inventory of the suprasegmental acoustic cues that are relevant to the automatic typology and identification of the dialects of British English. Using evidence from traditional dialectology suggesting that the dialects of the British Isles exhibit differences at the suprasegmental level – and, in particular, in terms of rhythm – we apply procedures that have ...

This paper deals with how to construct Text To Speech (TTS) systems for Chinese dialects. The proposed method adapts Chinese Mandarin TTS system to dialects TTS systems through representing dialect phonology by Mandarin phonology using phonology mappings, and adding dialect vocabulary in the front end to handle lexical difference. But not all Chinese dialects are suitable for applying this adap...

Traditional Estonian dialect classifications are based on the phonology, morphology, and lexis, and there are very few studies about syntax available. The present paper is the first quantitative syntactic study of Estonian dialects. We concentrate on constructions consisting of finite and non-finite verbs, and we apply contemporary statistical methods to explore the syntactic variation. Our res...

This paper is an attempt to shed light on the effects of modernization, urbanization, monolingual educational system, and mass media as well as the process of globalization on dialect leveling among Persian dialects. In so doing, the first part of the paper elaborates on the relationship between globalization and sociolinguistics, and on the concept of standardization. Also, it discusses some ...

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...