One way of evaluating the salience of a linguistic feature is by assessing the extent to which listeners associate the feature with a social category such as a particular socioeconomic class, gender, or nationality. Such 'top-down' associations will inevitably differ somewhat from listener to listener, as a linguistic feature - the pronunciation of a vowel or consonant, for instance - can evoke...

Sarhaddi Balochi dialect, a language variety of Western (Rakhshani) Balochi, employs derivation through affixation as one of its word formation processes. The purpose of this article is to present a synchronic description of the way(s) different derivational affixes function in making complex words in Sarhaddi Balochi as spoken in Granchin[1] district located about 35Kms to the southeast of Kha...

“Borrowing” is a lingual process that is studied in diachronic linguistics. In this process a language borrows elements from another language. This process usually occurs in areas that two languages make contact with each other. In a dialect spoken in South Khorasan the language borrowing happens. Arabs living in this part of Iran probably have immigrated in the early centuries of Islam. In thi...

Traditional dialect maps based on data from carefully selected informants, usually give clear-cut dialect borders, isoglosses, with one dialect characteristic present on one side of the isogloss and absent on the other. We have compared results from traditional dialect research with results from a thorough auditory analysis of /r/ and /l/ pronunciation among the 1015 informants in the Norwegian...

The present study employs phonetic means and LZ-Score values to systematically investigate and tonal patterns and the internal differences of tones in Shandong (Hereinafter, SD) dialect. The dialect regions selected in the study is Jinan, Liaocheng, Tai’an and Zibo, all of which belong to Xiqi district. Results demonstrate that all of the four regions deserve four tones, specifically, tonal val...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the viability of simulating one dialect with the speech segments of another dialect through prosody cloning. The hypothesis is that, among Korean regional dialects, it is not the segmental differences but the prosodic differences that play a major role in authentic dialect perception. This work intends to support the hypothesis by simulating Masan dialect...

Dialect stereotypes are widespread. Birmingham English is perceived as ugly, Parisian French as cultivated. In Switzerland, Bern and Thurgau Swiss German lie on opposite ends of the attractiveness spectrum. In the present study, we examined how Swiss German, French, and English listeners – the latter two being unfamiliar with the dialects – rated the phonetic aesthetics of these two Swiss Germa...

Linguistic experience has been shown to affect the perception of regional dialect variation. This pilot study examined the effect of familiarity on the perceived similarity of regional dialects. Native speakers of American English completed a paired comparison perceptual similarity rating task with a group of unfamiliar regional dialects. Speakers of American English were asked to make explicit...

The aim of the present study was to relate articulatory properties of the Polish sibilants /s ʂ ɕ/ to a potential neutralization of /ʂ/ as either /s/ or /ɕ/, the former having occurred in a number of Polish dialects. For this purpose tongue tip (TT) movement data was obtained together with acoustic data using electromagnetic articulography. The sibilants, that were always followed by either /a ...

In this paper, we describe the work on Chinese multi-dialect speech processing. Based on the phonetic analysis of ten Chinese dialects, we have created a Chinese super phonetic system for the Chinese speech recognition. To exam this phonetic system and develop Chinese dialect speech technology, we are building a multi-dialect speech corpus, which includes 10 dialect areas and 2000 speakers.