The Levenshtein dialect distance method has proven to be a successful method for measuring phonetic distances between Dutch dialects. The aim of the present investigation is to validate the Levenshtein dialect distance with perceptual data from a language area other than the Dutch, namely Norway. We calculate the correlation between the Levenshtein distances and the distances between 15 Norwegi...

Swiss German is a dialect continuum whose dialects are very different from Standard German, the official language of the German part of Switzerland. However, dealing with Swiss German in natural language processing, usually the detour through Standard German is taken. As writing in Swiss German has become more and more popular in recent years, we would like to provide data to serve as a steppin...

Preaspiration is not unusual in connection with unvoiced consonants in Swedish. In all the 20 Northern Swedish dialects covered in this study unvoiced stops following stressed vowels are preaspirated to at least some extent, although preaspiration is not characteristic for all speakers. However, in two of the dialects preaspiration plays a more prominent and even normative role, being a means t...

This paper describes a pilot study in lexical encoding of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in 4 Latin American dialects of Spanish: Costa Rican, Colombian, Mexican and Peruvian. We describe the variability of MWE usage across dialects. We adapt an existing data model to a dialect-aware encoding, so as to represent dialect-related specificities, while avoiding redundancy of the data common for all ...

The sociolinguistic situation in Arabic countries is characterized by diglossia (Ferguson, 1959) : whereas one variant Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is highly codified and mainly used for written communication, other variants coexist in regular everyday’s situations (dialects). Similarly, while a number of resources and tools exist for MSA (lexica, annotated corpora, taggers, parsers . . . ), ve...

Dialectal variations provide vital cues to both synchronic and diachronic changes in sounds of a language. There has been no comparative phonological study of the dialects of Hindi in the last several decades. In this paper, we present a phonological description of seven of the major dialects of Hindi, namely, Awadhi, Bagheli, Bhojpuri, Bundeli, Haryanvi, Kanauji and Khari Boli, based on the ob...

This paper examines the manifestation of downstep and intonation in the Tokyo and Kochi dialects of Japanese by using three types of syntactically balanced material adjective phrases, adverbial phrases, and sentence modifiers. The main conclusion is that Kochi speakers produce a smaller Major Phrase consisting of fewer lexical accents than in the Tokyo dialect, the Major Phrase being defined as...

The present article presents a study of the raising of overlong mid vowels in Estonian dialects. Long mid vowels of South Estonian dialects (Mulgi, Tartu and Võru) have split into full-long mid vowels (Q2) and into overlong raised mid vowels (Q3). Raising of mid vowels also characterises West Estonian dialects. The formant values of raised mid vowels of Võru and Mulgi show that they are much hi...

This paper reports the successful completion of Japanese POLYPHONE project, Voice Across Japan (VAJ) data collection project. The database has the following characteristic, 1) large speakers database (8,866 spk.) through telephone line, 2) to gather participant's personal information such as gender, age, growing place, and so on, and 3) to put data segmented by phone or word boundary. This pape...