We present a computational analysis of three language varieties: native, advanced non-native, and translation. Our goal is to investigate the similarities and differences between non-native language productions and translations, contrasting both with native language. Using a collection of computational methods we establish three main results: (1) the three types of texts are easily distinguisha...

One centennial discussion in linguistics concerns whether languages, or linguistic systems, are, essentially, homogeneous or rather show “structured heterogeneity.” In this contribution, the question is addressed whether and how sociolinguistically defined systems (or ‘varieties’) are to be distinguished in a heterogeneous linguistic landscape: to what extent can structure be found in the myria...

Automatic Language Identification of written texts is a well-established area of research in Computational Linguistics. Stateof-the-art algorithms often rely on n-gram character models to identify the correct language of texts, with good results seen for European languages. In this paper we propose the use of a character n-gram model and a word n-gram language model for the automatic classifica...

Introduction The exact number of known living languages varies from 5,000 to 10,000, depending on one's definition of 'language'. An even larger number of dialects are spoken worldwide. Many of these languages and dialects (from now on taken together as 'languages' or 'varieties') are so similar that they are mutually intelligible to varying degrees, even without prior contact or formal instruc...

This document deals with speech recognition of different Portuguese varieties, it resumes results from the author’s diploma thesis [9]. The performance of a hybrid large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer, which combines multi-layer perceptrons and Hidden Markov Models, degrades heavily in the presence of African Portuguese varieties in broadcast news. Variety-specific acoustic and languag...

the present research attempts to describe, examine and analyze the nature and quality, as well as the linguistic origins, of the verbs in the novel missing soluch. since a, main concern in dowlatabadi 's writing style has been the use of a rich, well-wrought language, he has taken great advantage of various persian language treasures, such as: the standard language, tehrani`s colloquial languag...

The Spanish Sign Language Dictionary (DILSE) is one of the first truly bilingual (Spanish Sign Language-Spanish) electronic dictionaries for the deaf community. The properties of this format are perfectly matched to a visual language such as sign language, which uses space as a means of expression. Additionally, two-way searches for word entries are possible from either Spanish or signs. The si...

The growing variability in Europe’s standard languages has spawned widely shared accounts of destandardization, as well as premonitions of the death of the very idea of a standard language. In this paper, we propose an alternative to these views by demonstrating that the ‘classical’ standardness criteria (uniformity, prestige, codification) have become too narrow to define standard varieties in...

This paper challenges the exclusive reliance on speaker personality traits in experimental language attitude research. The most explicitly articulated motivation for this restriction is Kristiansen’s (2009) contention that the use of scales pertaining to the investigated varieties themselves could make listener-judges aware of the research purpose, as a result of which their attitudes would be ...

As a consequence of political changes and war, during the last decade the migration processes have been intensified and in comers from other parts of Croatia and neighbouring countries have moved to the town of Zagreb and have changed it considerably. These demographic changes have also had an influence on the language used in the area and on language attitudes towards the Standard Croatian, lo...