Dialectal Variation Research Articles

Text-Independent Automatic Dialect Recognition of Marathi Language using Spectro-Temporal Characteristics of Voice

Text-independent dialect recognition system is proposed in this paper for Marathi language. India is rich in language varieties. Each language in turn has its unique dialect variations. Maharashtra has Marathi as official language and for Goa it is a co-official language . In literature there are very few studies available for Indian language recognition and then their respective dialect recognition. So research work available for regional languages such as Marathi is extremely limited. As a part of research work, an attempt is made to generate a case study of a low resourced Marathi language dialect recognition system. The study was carried out using Marathi speech data corpus provided by Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Language (LDC- IL). This corpus includes four major dialects of Marathi speakers. The efficiency and performance evaluation of the explored spectral (rhythmic) and temporal features are carried out to perform classification tasks. We investigated the performance of six different classifiers; K-nearest neighbor (KNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT) classifier , Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) classifier and Ridge Classifier (RC). Experimental results have demonstrated that the RC classifier worked well with 84.24% of accuracy for fifteen spectral and temporal features. With twelve MFCCs it has been observed that SGD has outperformed among all classifiers with accuracy of 80.63%. For further study, a prominent feature subset as a part of dimensionality reduction has been identified using chi square, mutual information and ANOVA-f test. In this chi-square based feature extraction method has proven to be the best over over mutual information and ANOVA f-test.

Change in Buchan vowel harmony

English is not typically considered to be a vowel harmony language, and yet one of its cousins, Buchan Scots, clearly shows vowel-harmonic patterns. This involves a type of height harmony which is blocked by certain consonants and consonant clusters (which do not form a natural class). The front vowel /ɪ/ has historically functioned as a high vowel but seems to have changed into a non-high vowel in the inland dialectal variant. This article considers whether this change has also occurred in the costal variant of the dialect. From newly collected data, I observe that /ɪ/ continues to behave as a high vowel in the Buchan Scots spoken on the coast. However, there are some indications that the group of blocking consonants is shifting to include simple nasals and /r/. While simple nasals have been documented as blocking consonants in some varieties, /r/ has not.

Vectors of the State Language Policy of Russia and China in Relation to the National Language and Dialects (Comparative Aspect)

The status of state languages is fixed in the official documents of a particular country. In the Russian Federation, the Russian language is recognized as such, in some subjects, languages that are titular for representatives of different ethnic groups receive such status. In China, the language policy is aimed at the widespread promotion of the national Putonghua language, despite the fact that its status has not been constitutionally approved. The forms of language existence include literary (normative) the language and its dialect varieties. Together they represent the national language of a certain linguistic and cultural community. Dialects of Russian and Chinese have unique features expressed at all levels of the system. As a result of a long historical development, they demonstrate the linguistic richness and diversity of languages, as well as the most valuable cultural heritage of states. The language policy of the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China is based on the concept of national unity and is aimed at creating a common cultural space through the unification of language standards and the popularization of the language of interethnic communication.

Developing Unbiased Teacher Identity in Pluri-Accent Reality: Research-Based Classroom Activities

In the current pilot report, we draw on and further develop our previous research examining pre-service teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about accents, in which we proposed a pedagogical intervention reflecting certain aspects of our research outcomes, mainly the positive trend of embracing one’s non-nativeness. A set of four classroom activities, namely Nativeness perception test, Four corners, Bank of experiences and Sociodynamic teacher, were incorporated into three different online graduate courses in the winter and summer semesters 2020/2021 at the Department of the English Language and Literature, Faculty of Education in Prague. The piloting process was partly replicated in face-to-face classes of the following academic year. The overarching goal was to raise awareness of accent variation, especially in such a linguistically homogenous country as the Czech Republic and cultivate future teachers’ ability to address accent-related issues confidently, objectively and sensitively. The subsequent scrutiny of participants’ recorded discussions, written and/or oral feedback, submitted tasks as well as teachers’ observations indicated increased awareness of accent variability and a raised level of pedagogical confidence in approaching accent in the classroom context. Particularly, the respondents proved to be highly creative when devising adequate and supportive reactions to imagined negative comments related to accents or preventing them by specifically designing their lesson plans. Furthermore, the pedagogical intervention was appraised by the participating graduate students in their reflective assessment one year later.

Leveraging feature-level fusion representations and attentional bidirectional RNN-CNN deep models for Arabic affect analysis on Twitter

Arabic affect analysis on Twitter avidly helps to capture the emotional states of individuals being expressed regarding many targets, such as world-level events, products, and services. It is the key to monitoring and advancing human intelligence, which impacts human decision-making processes efficiently. However, state-of-the-art models have not witnessed serious developments yet since they have just achieved an accuracy of around 54%. This inaccuracy is mainly due to the agglutination, dialectal variation, and morphological richness of the Arabic language, as well as the unique features of tweets, such as shortness, noisiness, and informal language. This paper presents an approach that tackles these challenges and then improves the performance of Arabic affect analysis on Twitter. First, we propose a novel feature-based fusion representation for Arabic tweets to capture the polysemy, semantic/syntactic information, and conveyed emotional knowledge; and to deal with Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words. Second, we propose an attentional deep learning model based on Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), and Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to effectively learn local and global features and provide a multilabel emotional classification. The experimental results indicate that our proposal outperforms twelve state-of-the-art and baseline methods with a significant improvement of 6% in accuracy.

Deep Neural Networks for Enhancing Conversational AI in Multilingual India

This paper investigates the application of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in developing conversational AI systems tailored for India's multilingual population. The study evaluates various neural network architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), to enhance speech recognition and natural language understanding in Indian languages. Challenges like language diversity, dialect variation, and low-resource languages are addressed by introducing new training datasets and multilingual models. The paper also examines how conversational AI systems can be integrated into customer service, education, and healthcare sectors in India, with a focus on inclusivity and accessibility.

РОЗВИТОК ІНШОМОВНОЇ КОМУНІКАТИВНОЇ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТІ СТУДЕНТІВ ФІЛОЛОГІЧНИХ СПЕЦІАЛЬНОСТЕЙ МЕТОДАМИ АКТИВНОГО НАВЧАННЯ

The article deals with active learning methods used in the training of philologists to develop foreign language communicative competence. The authors clarify the term of foreign language communicative competence which is considered as a basic component of the professional competence of philologists. It is defined as an ability based on the system of acquired knowledge and skills, as well as individual characteristics, qualities, values, which ensures the organization and implementation of interpersonal, intercultural communication in different languages in oral or written form, allows philologists to solve complex professional tasks and practical problems. Dramatization and performance of original works of fiction and films are considered as effective methods that promote the development of communicative competence, mental abilities, and the emotional sphere of students. The application of these methods in the training of philologists by means of interpretation of literary works in a foreign language enables them to explore the socio-cultural context, to get acquainted with linguistic markers of social relations, folk wisdom, variety of dialects and accents, and to acquire an original positive linguistic experience. Dramatization increases student educational motivation, removes psychological barriers to communication in a foreign language, helps to master and choose relevant speech patterns for better assimilation of lexical and grammatical structures, speech patterns, to improve pronunciation, intonation. These active learning methods allow students to integrate skills and abilities in the process of a creative activity, while simultaneously applying speaking skills in a meaningful context and emotionally rich learning interaction.

Aproximación sociolingüística al doblado de clítico de objeto directo en Lambayeque, Perú

In this research, we analyze the accusative clitic doubling in Spanish Lambayeque. We understood accusative clitic doubling as the presence of the clitic of the direct object in co-occurrence with the nominal phrase of the direct object in postverbal position. The analysis is carried out in four cities of Lambayeque: Chiclayo, Eten, Ferreñafe and Mochumí. The four cities studied were chosen according to the level of contact with Quechua, economic activities, and greater centrality in education and services. The analysis was conducted in 72 interviews. We investigate the statistical significance of four linguistic factors: animacy, definiteness, and concordance (of gender and number) in the occurrence of the accusative double. In addition, the social factors of age, gender, and city of origin were studied. The results show that the accusative clitic doubling in this dialect variety is sensitive to the animacy, definiteness, and agreement between the determining phrase (FD) and the corresponding clitic. We found the possibility of proposing a hierarchy of significance among the studied factors.

Board culture and bank innovation: Evidence from China

This study mainly investigates the influence mechanism and effect of board culture on bank innovation. On the basis of unique cultural context of the East and state-owned bank attributes, we used the data of China's A-share listed banks from 2003 to 2018 to construct the cultural indicators of the board of directors, and used the dialect diversity index to measure the cultural diversity of the board of directors. Results show that the indicators of masculinity, degree of indulgence and cultural diversity are directly proportional to bank innovation. The value of power distance and uncertainty avoidance is inversely proportional to bank innovation. Further analysis found that the Oriental culture of the board of directors mainly affects bank innovation through channels such as human capital investment and efficiency and bank risk-taking. Our research results remain robust after controlling for endogenous issues and influencing factors such as Confucian culture.

Dialectal variation in lexical borrowings in Dangme

language spoken in Southern Ghana. Dangme has seven dialects (Ada, Gbugblaa, Yilɔ Krobo, Manya Krobo, Nugo, Sɛ and Osudoku), but this study concerns lexical borrowings into the first four. The language is in contact with four languages from which it has borrowed: Ewe, Ga, Akan, and English. Each dialect of Dangme is in direct contact with English, the official language of Ghana, and with at least one of the three Ghanaian languages. While Ada is in contact with Ewe and Gbugblaa with Ga, both Yilɔ Krobo and Manya Krobo are in contact with Akan and, to some extent, Ewe. The study departed from focus on phonological adaptation of borrowed words, the subject matter of previous studies, to pursue two interrelated objectives, i.e., to find out: (i) whether, and to what extent, borrowings into a dialect from a given source language remain localized or are transferred to the other dialects and (ii) whether, and what extent, the lexical borrowings constitute additions to the Dangme lexicon or, conversely, a relexification of native words in the lexicon. Eighty (80) respondents, 20 each from the four dialects considered, were purposively sampled to participate in the data collection process and the data analysis was done within the Variationist Sociolinguistics Theory. It was found that while most Akan and English lexical borrowings have become integrated in all the four dialects of Dangme, this is not the case with lexical borrowings from Ga and Ewe. Most Ga borrowings are found only in Gbugblaa and most Ewe borrowings are found only in Ada and, to some extent, Manya Krobo. It was also found that Akan and English lexical borrowings generally constitute additions to the Dangme lexicon while Ewe and Ga lexical borrowings may be seen as subtractive borrowings or cases of relexification in Ada and Gbugblaa respectively. The study is expected to contribute to an understanding of how languages like Dangme whose dialects have geographical contact with different languages develop dialectal variation.

MIND your language(s): Recognizing Minority, Indigenous, Non-standard(ized), and Dialect variety usage in “monolinguals”

AbstractWhile Psychology research in general has been criticized for oversampling from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations, Psycholinguistics has a problem with conducting a large amount of research on a relatively small number of languages. Yet even within WEIRD environments, the experiences of speakers of Minority, Indigenous, Non-standard(ized), and Dialect (MIND) varieties are not always captured alongside their use of a more prestigious standard language.This position piece will provide a case study of one such variety: Scots, a Germanic variety spoken in Scotland, which is often considered “bad English.” However, its speakers display cognitive characteristics of bilingualism despite often regarding themselves as monolingual due to sociolinguistic factors. Such factors include social prestige and language ideology, as well as linguistic distance. In doing so, this paper introduces a new acronym encouraging researchers to MIND their language – by developing more inclusive ways of capturing the linguistic experiences of MIND speakers, to move away from binary distinctions of “bilingual” and “monolingual,” and to recognize that not all varieties are afforded the status of language, nor do many multilinguals consider themselves as anything other than monolingual.

The Comparison Between Kerinci Siulak and Kerinci Rawang Dialect

The Kerinci dialect has various variations in almost every region. These dialects also have differences, both at the phonological and lexical levels between dialects. However, speakers and interlocutors understand each other when speaking in their respective dialects so that it does not prevent the Kerinci people from communicating with each other. The purpose of the research was to describe the differences in language variation between the Kerinci Siulak dialect and the Kerinci Rawang dialect. This research uses Jeff Siegel's theory of language and dialect variations. In reviewing the data of this study using qualitative methods, while data collection used interview methods with recording techniques. This research was conducted in Hamparan Rawang Village and in Siulak Village, Kerinci Regency with 5 informants. The results showed that based on the available data, in the Kerinci language, the Siulak dialect and the Rawang dialect, there are sounds which are phonemes that can be grouped into three groups, namely vowels, diphthongs, and consonants. The Siulak and Rawang dialects have 23 sounds, with 5 vowels, 10 consonants, and 8 diphthongs. The correspondence phonemes of the two dialects are 35 which are at the initial, middle and final syllable caused by geographical, sociocultural and social status factors.

Da rugiada a ruggine. Poesia dialettale e ambiente: Pasolini, Zanzotto, De Vita

The scope of the present article is to reflect upon the question of the environment within the context of the discussion concerning the use of dialect in the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrea Zanzotto, Nino De Vita and other poets from Sicily. Commencing from the concept of ‘diversity’, as intended by Pasolini as the disappearance of the rural world, which occurs in step with the eclipses of dialectal variety, the essay will demonstrate how the environment – the crucial focus of the poetry of the above mentioned poets – converges concepts of dialects, territoriality and animality. The ecocritical method, which is applied in this study, enables one to signal the urgency to reflect upon the situation of contemporary poetry, in particular of Sicilian poetry, which has its roots in Nino De Vita’s poetic works, inextricably tied to the place, the natural and the cultural context of the island. The new Sicilian poetry does not cancel ‘diversity’, which on the contrary is capable of confronting environmental issues – at times also beyond the island’s borders – and it feeds from the lymph, from the root of the dialect.

Semantics of Phraseological Units with a Borrowed Component in the Speech of Russian Germans

This article reflects the results of a study on identifying the semantic features of phraseological units containing borrowings from the Russian language in the dialects of Russian Germans. The scientific novelty of the study includes the description of the specifics of the meaning of phraseological units of insular Russian-German dialects containing borrowed elements in their composition, tracing phraseological units created by German dialect means to convey the semantics of Russian set expressions, as well as semi-calques containing direct borrowings from the Russian language. The phraseological fund, presented in the text corpus of the Russian-German dialects existing in the Altai Territory, is characterized by significant originality, as it contains many phraseological units that differ from the standard and the original dialect variants. These features are reflected in the analysis of the studied fragment of the phraseological system of Russian-German dialects, phraseological units with components borrowed from the Russian language. As a result of the study, it was proved that borrowed words, penetrating into German phraseological units from the main lexical fund, acquire an expressive coloring, giving the phraseological unit additional evaluative meanings. Traced phraseological units of the Russian language serve to expand the phraseological fund of insular German dialects.

Exposure to dialect variation in an artificial language prior to literacy training impairs reading of words with competing variants but does not affect decoding skills.

Many bidialectal children grow up speaking a variety (e.g., a regional dialect) that differs from the variety in which they subsequently acquire literacy. Previous computational simulations and artificial literacy learning experiments with adults have demonstrated lower accuracy in reading contrastive words for which dialect variants exist compared with noncontrastive words without dialect variants. At the same time, exposure to multiple varieties did not affect learners' ability to phonologically decode untrained words; in fact, longer literacy training resulted in a benefit from dialect exposure as competing variants in the input may have increased reliance on grapheme-phoneme conversion. However, these previous experiments interleaved word learning and reading/spelling training, yet children typically acquire substantial oral language knowledge prior to literacy training. Here we used artificial literacy learning with adults to examine whether the previous findings replicate in an ecologically more valid procedure where word learning precedes literacy training. We also manipulated training conditions to explore interventions thought to be beneficial for literacy acquisition, such as providing explicit social cues for variety use and literacy training in both varieties. Our findings replicated the reduced accuracy for reading contrastive words in those learners who had successfully acquired the dialect variants prior to literacy training. This effect was exacerbated when literacy training also included dialect variation. Crucially, although no benefits from the interventions were found, dialect exposure did not affect reading and spelling of untrained words suggesting that phonological decoding skills can remain unaffected by the existence of multiple word form variants in a learner's lexicon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Deconstructing the myth of Standard German: Navigating language ideologies in the L2 German university classroom

AbstractPrevious research has established a connection between Standard Language Ideology (SLI) and prestige and power and has highlighted the existence of a dominant cultural narrative that idealizes Standard High German as a provider of cultural elevation and unity, viewing nonstandard Germanic varieties as exotic. Nevertheless, scholars have likewise emphasized the importance of familiarizing L2 German students with the standard and nonstandard regional and dialectal varieties that are widely used within and across Germanic‐speaking countries. Through a grounded ethnographic approach involving classroom observations and interviews, the study suggests that the L2 German university students observed seemed to believe in the superiority of Standard German despite efforts by their instructors to counter this belief. The study extends previous research by illustrating L2 German instructors' negotiation strategies, used to highlight the communicative legitimacy of German and Austrian dialects to their students.

Teachers’ Perceptions of Heritage Language Learners: A Large-scale Survey Study on Dialect Variation, Expectations, and Assessment Needs

Abstract Many case studies of heritage language learners (HLL s) have documented learners’ perceptions and experiences, including experiences of stigmatization in the classroom for use of a non-standard variation or for not meeting teachers’ expectations of an HLL. However, few have investigated teachers’ perceptions of their HLL s, and how these could address or illuminate documented negative learning experiences. The current study uses survey methodology to investigate language teachers’ language ideologies of heritage languages and perceptions of HLL s on a larger scale than previous efforts. The study is inclusive of teachers of different grade levels, types of classrooms, and, perhaps most importantly, different languages. By looking at a wide array of participants (N = 325), this study addresses the overarching question: How do language teachers perceive their HLL s in the classroom? The findings provide insight on teachers’ views of HLL s’ dialects, their expectations of learners, and the practical needs of teachers.

Dialect diversity and total factor productivity: Evidence from Chinese listed companies.

Using a sample of Chinese listed companies over the 2007-2019 period, we examined the influence of dialect diversity on a firm's total factor productivity. We found that dialect diversity affects the psychological distance of interpersonal communication and significantly affects the firm's total factor productivity. The results are robust to a battery of tests based on different specifications. The relationship between dialect diversity and a firm's total factor productivity is more pronounced in state-owned enterprises, firms located in southern regions, and more capital-intensive firms. Furthermore, we demonstrated an innovative factor flow mechanism and a human capital accumulation mechanism through which dialect diversity inhibits total factor productivity. Overall, this paper provides new evidence and decision-making reference for coordinating the protection of dialect diversity and high-quality economic development.

Linguistic complexity of South Slavic dialects: a new perspective on old data.

This article presents the results of a quantitative study in which the complexity levels of dialectal varieties belonging to the South Slavic dialect continuum are measured and analyzed. The sample comprises 919 data points, pertaining to the Bulgarian-Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian dialect continua. Complexity is viewed in this study as a property demonstrating variation across areas and subject to diachronic change which can be associated either with language-internal processes or with language contact. This study discusses which linguistic processes produced varying levels of complexity in the modern South Slavic varieties. In particular, a correlation of complexity with altitude and distance to the Albanian border, two factors which can be associated with degree of isolation versus contact of speech communities, is investigated for a subset of varieties spoken across the areas with bi- and multilingual population. Suggestions on which constellations of societal features could act as determinants of linguistic change are made for several areas within the South Slavic continuum. Particular attention is paid to the contact-related developments in the South Slavic varieties spoken in the areas of intensive past and present contact, such as the west of North Macedonia, the south of Montenegro, Kosovo, and Southeast Serbia.

Regional variation in the syntactic use of qad reflexes: Convergence or divergence in Saudi Arabic varieties?

In Classical Arabic (CA), qad, a discourse particle has been extensively studied. However, the linguistic behavior of the different reflexes of the particle qad in Saudi varieties (SVs), namely gid, gīd, jid, and dzid, has not been studied. Due to this lack, the current study, as primary exploratory, aimed to describe the syntactic uses of qad reflexes in SVs. In doing so, interviews were conducted in which a structured questionnaire was used with several CA scenarios describing different situations and asking participants to express them in their dialect varieties. For this study, 150 speakers from five SVs participated. The results revealed that qad reflexes are used in verbal sentences in SVs. However, unlike qad in CA, in SVs qad reflexes also occur in interrogative and negative sentences, and nominal phrases (i.e., immediately preceding the nouns). With reference to frequency, they are more often used in Southwestern and Hijazi and to a lesser extent in Najdi variety. However, they are less frequently in Eastern and Northern varieties. Although it is not possible to confirm with full reliability and certainty that this change is a divergence or convergence, yet it seems that qad, as many other Arabic linguistic features, is a case of divergence. Alternatively, the rich presence of qad reflexes in the Saudi Arabian spoken varieties suggests that the syntax of qad in CA might not have been documented completely. If this argument is to be understood better, further sociolinguistic studies are needed.