In this text we present “profile-based linguistic uniformity”, a method designed to compare language varieties on the basis of a wide range of potentially heterogeneous linguistic variables. In many respects a parallel can be drawn with current methods in dialectometry (for an overview, see Nerbonne and Heeringa, 2001; Heeringa, Nerbonne and Kleiweg, 2002): in both cases dissimilarities between...

the present article describes the common phonological features of linguistic varieties in 20 areas of sarakhs city. one hundred linguistic forms were gathered through interviews and questionnaires. the subjects were mostly adults, farmers, illiterate people and villagers. the phonological processes observed in these varieties were: 1. assimilation of consonants and vowels ablauting, 2. addition...

This paper describes a language/accent verification system for Portuguese, that explores different type of properties: acoustic, phonotactic and prosodic. The two-stage system is designed to be used as a pre-processing module for the Portuguese Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system developed at INESC-ID. As the ASR system is applied everyday to transcribe the evening news from a Portuguese ...

This study provides evidence that the role of the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) in substrate languages is reflected in prosodic systems of contact varieties of French. We have compared two contact varieties: Central African French, a variety of French spoken by L1 speakers of Sango a lexical tone language where the constraint is not respected, and Burundi French, which is spoken by L1 spea...

We perform a large-scale analysis of language diatopic variation using geotagged microblogging datasets. By collecting all Twitter messages written in Spanish over more than two years, we build a corpus from which a carefully selected list of concepts allows us to characterize Spanish varieties on a global scale. A cluster analysis proves the existence of well defined macroregions sharing commo...

This paper describes our work in digital talking book alignment, starting by our earlier efforts for the alignment of books in European Portuguese, and ending with the two challenges we are currently facing of aligning books in different varieties of Portuguese and aligning parallel books in different languages. Our alignment module proved robust enough for porting to other varieties of Portugu...

This article presents supervised computational methods for the identification of Spanish varieties. The features used for this task were the classical character and word n-gram language models as well as POS and morphological information. The use of these features is to our knowledge new and we aim to explore the extent to which it is possible to identify language varieties solely based on gram...