• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.8
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• pp.291-313
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• 2006

Previously, studies concerning the Russian dialects have been mainly focused on northern, central, and southern dialects limited to western Russia of Ural Mountains. On the contrary, the Siberian and Far-eastern dialects have been completely disregarded to the main stream of the Russian dialectology. As a result of a poll concerning this idea, the majority has answered that there is no dialect in Siberian and Far-east regions. Though the reasons for the outcome of the poll could vary, it could not be simply accepted that there is no dialect in such vast regions. Thus, a survey has took place to examine the existence of dialects in the regions of Siberia and Far-east. The first phase of the survey inquired the residents of the regions including Siberia and Far-east to respond to questions regarding 83 vocabularies on wedding in contrast to the regions covering western Ural and Moscow. The 23 informants were residents of the concerned regions who have come to visit Pushkin National Institute of Russian Language and, others, Korea. The questionnaires used in this survey were partly obtained from the questionnaires originated by the Language Institute of St. Petersburg National University. Although the limited range of regions and a small number of respondents who partook in this survey could raise some issues on the table, it is relevant to understand that this study would open up the path for the development of studies concerning regional dialects in the future.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.22-38
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• 2015

While Modern Standard Arabic is the formal spoken and written language of the Arab world; dialects are the major communication mode for everyday life. Therefore, identifying a speaker's dialect is critical in the Arabic-speaking world for speech processing tasks, such as automatic speech recognition or identification. In this paper, we examine two approaches that reduce the Universal Background Model (UBM) in the automatic dialect identification system across the five following Arabic Maghreb dialects: Moroccan, Tunisian, and 3 dialects of the western (Oranian), central (Algiersian), and eastern (Constantinian) regions of Algeria. We applied our approaches to the Maghreb dialect detection domain that contains a collection of 10-second utterances and we compared the performance precision gained against the dialect samples from a baseline GMM-UBM system and the ones from our own improved GMM-UBM system that uses a Reduced UBM algorithm. Our experiments show that our approaches significantly improve identification performance over purely acoustic features with an identification rate of 80.49%.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.6
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• pp.33-44
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• 1999

This paper aims to analyze whether the phenomenon of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ is a hypercorrection or not in the North Korean dialects. Most North Koreans pronounce /i/(gold) as /kum/ because the vowel /i/ merges into the peripheral vowel space of /u/ in their dialects. The merger of back vowel is one of most distinctive characters in North Korean dialects. But some speakers pronounce /chubann/(exile) as /chiban/. This time /u/ in peripheral space moves to /i/ in central vowel space. It seems that the vowels /i/ and /u/ exchange places with each other when they uttered in North Korean. Though it was observed that the vowel movement of /i/$\rightarrow$/u/ was caused by the merger of back vowels, the reason why vowel /u/ moves in the opposite direction, that is, the central space of vowel /i/ has not been analyzed yet. This experiment starts with hypothesis that the movement of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ might be caused by hypercorrection. The first step of this research is to analyze /u/$\rightarrow$/i/ pronunciation of North Koreans. The second step is to compare the results of North Korean pronunciation with those of South Korean pronunciation and observe whether tendency of /u/$\rightarrow$/i/pronunciation can also be found in the standard Seoul dialect and other South Korean dialects.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.207-207
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• 1996

The neutral tone is one of the most important distinguishing features in Beijing Mandarin, but there are two completely different views on its linguistic function: a special tone(Xu, 1980) versus weak stress(Chao, 1968). In this paper, the acoustic manifestation of the neutral tone will be explored to show that it is closely related to weak stress. 122 disyllabic words in which the second syllable carries the neutral tone, including 22 stress pairs, were uttered by a native male speaker of Beijing dialect and analysed by Kay Digital Sonagraph 5500-1. The results of the acoustic analysis are presented as follows: 1) The first two formants of the medial and the syllabic vowel moves towards that of central vowel with a greater magnitude in the syllable with the neutral tone than in the syllable with any of the four normal tones. Also the vowel ending, and nasal coda /n/ and / / in the syllable with the neutral tone tends to be deleted. 2) In the syllables with the neutral tone, there are strong carryover coarticulations between the medial and syllabic vowel and the preceding unvoiced consonant. In general, the vowel is affected to move towards the position of the central vowel with more greater magnitude by coronal consonant than by labial or velar consonant. 3) In the syllable with the neutral tone, when and only when it precedes a syllable with tone-4, the high vowel following [f], [ts'], [s], [ts'], [s], [tc'] or [c] tends to be voiceless. 4) It can be seen from the acoustical results of 22 stress pairs that the duration of the syllable with the neutral tone is on the average reduced to 55% of that of the syllable with the four normal tones, and the duration of the final in the syllable with neutral tone is on the average reduced to 45% of that of the final in the syllable with the four normal tones(Lin & Yan 1980). 5) The FO contour of the neutral tone is highly dependent on the preceding normal tone(Lin & Yan 1993). For a number of languages it has been found that the vowel space is reduced as the level of stress placed upon the vowel is reduced(Nord 1986). Therefore we reach the conclusion that the syllable with neutral tone is related to weak stress(Lin & Yan 1990). The neutral tone is not a special tone because the preceding normal tone.