Standard Dialect Research Articles

Exploring end-to-end framework towards Khasi speech recognition system

Building a conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) system based on hidden Markov model (HMM)/deep neural network (DNN) makes the system complex as it requires various modules such as acoustic, lexicon, linguistic resources, language models etc. particularly with the low resource languages. In contrast, End-to-End architecture has greatly simplifies the model building process by representing complex modules with a simple deep network and by replacing the use of linguistic resources with a data-driven learning techniques. In this paper, we present our prior work by exploring End-to-End (E2E) framework for Khasi speech recognition system and the novel extension towards the development of speech corpora for standard Khasi dialect. We implemented the proposed E2E model by using Nabu ASR toolkit. Additionally, three other models (monophone, triphone and hybrid DNN) were built. Comparing the results, significant improvement was achieved using the proposed method particularly with the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) with a character error rate (CER) of 5.04%.

The Current Use of Standard Dialects in the United States Theatre Industry

ABSTRACT As a continuation of a research agenda focused on the current use of standard dialects in the United States, this study explores the 2018–19 production seasons of regional and Broadway theatres, and interviews industry professionals to weigh in on the topic of standard dialects in the industry. In this mixed methods study, quantitative and qualitative data were collected through (Phase 1) surveys from regional theatres; (Phase 2) surveys from Broadway coaches; and (Phase 3) expert interviews with industry professionals and speech practitioners. The major findings included: (1) “no standard dialect utilized” yielded the highest number of responses for productions of regional theatres; (2) Broadway coaches utilized General American and Location Specific Accents the most; and (3) industry professionals regarded flexibility and malleability as the most beneficial speech skills. The pedagogical implications of this research suggest that focusing on speech skills rather than acquisition of one standardized dialect as the “industry standard” is one way speech practitioners can better align their curricula with the theatre industry’s expectations and the need for a more inclusive approach to teaching speech.

Фразеологизмы с временным компонентом в речи российских немцев

The phraseological fund of German island dialects of the Altai Territory in Russia is signifi-cantly distinctive, containing many phraseological units differing from standard and original dialect variants. These features are revealed when analyzing the Russian-German dialect phraseological system fragment, i. e., phraseological units with time components. The devel-opment of the phraseological fund of the island dialects concerned is defined by the presence of common German phraseological units represented in standard German and modern German dialects, the preservation of old elements of the phraseological system, out of use in the territory of the original language group, and a certain permeability caused by the influence of a foreign language environment. Taken together, these facts explain the phraseological varia-bility and emergence of some distinctive features in the researched fragment of the phraseo-logical system of the dialects under consideration, resulting from originally related dialects being mixed and influenced by the Russian language. Most of the phraseological units of is-land Russian-German dialects under consideration are represented by dialect idioms with time components that differ in their structure and/or semantics from phraseological units of the German literary language. The differences in structure are associated with the presence of dia-lectic phonetic and grammatical features of dialects, which are superimposed by the lexical-semantic features that appeared in the process of the dialect existence in a foreign language environment for a long time. Idioms with time components belong to the active phraseological fund of the language, with their active usage indicating a particular significance in the Russian-German cultural space.

The Process of Word Formation in English and Kurdish Languages: A Comparative Typological Study

English and Kurdish are two morphologically different Indo-European languages. The first is the most analytic language among all of the European languages, while the second is an agglutinative, incorporating language. The paper concerns itself only with the standard dialects of the two languages, which are hypothesized to be different in the process of forming word. In this paper, an attempt is made to identify how many word-formation patterns occur in each language? Then, the paper aims at examining and contrasting where does English and Kurdish word formation resemble morphologically? And where do they differ? For this study, the data have been collected from various English and Kurdish sources and re-analyzed with reference to word formation in the two languages.

Comparison of Two Dialects of Pashto, Spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Pashto language, spoken in two countries Afghanistan and Pakistan, has numerous dialects. Existing studies show maximum five groups of the varieties of Pashto. Geographical and political factors followed by the absence of a comprehensive study of the Pashto dialects caused divided orthography and lack of unified literary and standard dialect in Pashto. This article mainly focuses on the classification, differences and literary and social status of the two mentioned dialects. Kandahari and Yusufzai dialects have been analyzed and compared mainly on phonological bases.

Varieties of Language and the Quest for Excellence in its Teaching and Learning

Human beings are different from animals in being able to organize the range of sounds produced by body mechanism into a highly efficient system of their identical language-based communication which has a network of varieties along with space, time, and social classes, deciding the identity, lexis and structural aspects of that variety of language known as a dialect. When one person uses one dialect in his own unique way, it is called his idiolect but different roles and situations decide the register and style of that dialect which is used as a standard dialect, no less than a language in itself. Every language has its own sounds, words, sentence patterns, and semantic meanings which need to be taught and learned. For this, three variables namely, the students, the methods/ approaches, and the teachers should be given due attention for further exploration in the field of academic study (teaching and learning) of the English language.

The native speaker fallacy in a U.S. university Japanese and Chinese program

AbstractInformed by concepts of native speakers, racial nativism, and language socialization theory, this study documented the existence of the native speaker fallacy (Phillipson, 1992, Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press) in a university‐level Japanese and Chinese program in the United States. Specifically, the researcher collected survey responses from language teachers and students, conducted interviews, and observed the teacher training process, one‐on‐one teaching sessions, and classroom teaching over the course of 2 academic years. A regression analysis showed how the perception of native and non‐native speakers was significantly influenced by students’ language level, native language, and race, and by the language program itself. The cases of a dialectal speaker and biracial Japanese teachers illustrated the effects of the bifurcated categorizations on teachers who do not fit in the dichotomy. Implications derived from this study call for critical analysis of the valorization of standard dialect and investigation into ways that will make more room for diversity in the language classroom. This study also underscores the importance of debriefing meetings that allow language professionals and students to reflect their teaching and learning experiences in relation to their identities and to examine unquestioned assumptions about language and racial identities and language standardization in increasingly globalized and diverse communities.

General Northern English. Exploring Regional Variation in the North of England With Machine Learning.

In this paper, we present a novel computational approach to the analysis of accent variation. The case study is dialect leveling in the North of England, manifested as reduction of accent variation across the North and emergence of General Northern English (GNE), a pan-regional standard accent associated with middle-class speakers. We investigated this instance of dialect leveling using random forest classification, with audio data from a crowd-sourced corpus of 105 urban, mostly highly-educated speakers from five northern UK cities: Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Sheffield. We trained random forest models to identify individual northern cities from a sample of other northern accents, based on first two formant measurements of full vowel systems. We tested the models using unseen data. We relied on undersampling, bagging (bootstrap aggregation) and leave-one-out cross-validation to address some challenges associated with the data set, such as unbalanced data and relatively small sample size. The accuracy of classification provides us with a measure of relative similarity between different pairs of cities, while calculating conditional feature importance allows us to identify which input features (which vowels and which formants) have the largest influence in the prediction. We do find a considerable degree of leveling, especially between Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, although some differences persist. The features that contribute to these differences most systematically are typically not the ones discussed in previous dialect descriptions. We propose that the most systematic regional features are also not salient, and as such, they serve as sociolinguistic regional indicators. We supplement the random forest results with a more traditional variationist description of by-city vowel systems, and we use both sources of evidence to inform a description of the vowels of General Northern English.

German V2 and Doubly Filled COMP in West Germanic

The paper addresses the issue of Doubly Filled COMP effects in embedded interrogatives in West-Germanic languages, with particular attention paid to German: in these patterns, an overt interrogative operator co-occurs with an overt complementiser. Such configurations are ruled out from standard West-Germanic varieties, while they are attested in non-standard dialects. The paper argues that there are both theoretical and empirical arguments against the postulation of a Doubly Filled COMP Filter, proposing instead that the insertion of a visible complementiser in non-standard dialects in fact follows from the properties of the general syntactic paradigm in which empty complementisers are generally not possible. It is shown that doubling is not restricted to embedded constituent questions, but it may occur in polar questions as well. Further, the finiteness feature can be checked off by verb movement, as is the case in V2 patterns in German (and generally in Germanic, including historical English) and in T-to-C-movement in English. In this way, the property of V2 is linked to Doubly Filled COMP; in either case, there is no need to postulate a cartographic template with multiple projections but a minimal, merge-based model is sufficient and in fact favourable. The proposed model aims at accounting for the possible correlations between the properties of the head element and the properties of the fronted element merged as a specifier (if there is any). Finally, the observed syntactic differences between standard varieties and dialects in West Germanic can be attributed to minimal lexical differences.

Getting a (big) data-based grip on ideological change. Evidence from Belgian Dutch

AbstractIn this paper we introduce a computationally enriched experimental tool designed to investigate language ideology (change). In a free response experiment, 211 respondents returned three adjectives in reaction to the labels for five regional varieties, one ethnic variety and two supra-regional varieties of Belgian Dutch, as well as the standard accent of Netherlandic Dutch. Valence information (pertaining to the positive/negative character of the responses) and big data–based distributional analysis (to detect semantic similarity between the responses) were used to cluster the response adjectives into 11 positive and 11 negative evaluative dimensions. Correspondence analysis was subsequently used to compute and visualize the associations between these evaluative dimensions and the investigated language labels, in order to generate “perceptual maps” of the Belgian language repertoire. Contrary to our expectations, these maps unveiled not only the dominant value system which drives standard usage, but also the competing ideology which frames the increasingly occurring non-standard forms. In addition, they revealed a much richer stratification than the “one variety good, all other varieties bad” dichotomy we had anticipated: while VRT-Dutch remains the superior (albeit increasingly virtual) standard for Belgian Dutch, the stigmatized colloquial variety Tussentaal is gradually being accepted as a practical lingua franca, and the Ghent-accent is boosted by modern prestige (dynamism) features. Even more crucially, separate perceptual maps for the older and younger respondents lay bare generational change: there is a growing conceptual proximity between VRT-Dutch and Tussentaal in the younger perceptions.

On Methodology of Dialectological Research

The paper deals with problems which arise in the research of local dialects in new conditions when the organic state has been replaced with the sociolinguistic situation. Local dialects have been increasingly falling under the influence of the standard dialect (and a dialect of newcomers). The dialectological research today often deals with reconstruction, rather than the real image of dialect, unless such an image is required. Furthermore, general instructions about dialectological research are given.

ESL Learners' Enhancement of Standard English Accent Among Khotimul Quran of A Primary School Students in Malaysia


 
 
 CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) is a new syllabus for English language subject of Malaysia primary school students. However, none of pronunciation elements involve the stress, rhythm and intonation have been emphasized to accomplish Standard English Accent. The issue is that, Malaysian primary school students do not apply correct stress and intonation while speaking and reading Standard English. Therefore, this study aims to identify the use of stress, rhythm and intonation applied in their spoken English words by both groups. The researcher had choose 15 Khotimul Quran students as the experimental group, whose background had complete reciting Quran for the whole 30 Juz and 15 common students as the control group from Sekolah Kebangsaan Pusat Air Tawar, Johor as the unit of analysis. The researcher uses semi-structured interview, observation and focus group discussion to triangulate the data. Pilot data analysis of the responses had shown a strong correlation between speaking Standard accent with correct stress, rhythm and intonation among the Khotimul Quran. Based on this results, the researcher expects the experimental group those who have Quranic-phonological background achieves higher percentages of accurateness of speaking Standard English accent compares to the control group.
 
 

Some words about english dielects and its features

This article is written to give information standard and nonstandard English dialects, as well upto-date variants of English dialects. Among some non-English speaking EU countries, a large percentage of the adult population can converse in English-in particular: 85% in Sweden, 83% in Denmark, 79% in the Netherlands, 66% in Luxembourg and over 50% in Finland, Slovenia, Austria, Belgium, and Germany. A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect; a regional dialect may be termed a regiolect or topolect. The other usage refers to a language socially subordinate to a regional or national standard language, often historically cognate to the standard, but not a variety of it or in any other sense derived from it. Within England, variation is now largely confined to pronunciation rather than grammar or vocabulary. At the time of the Survey of English Dialects, grammar and vocabulary differed across the country, but a process of lexical attrition has led most of this variation to die out. Scots has its origins in early Northern Middle English and developed and changed during its history with influence from other sources, but following the Acts of Union 1707 a process of language attrition began, whereby successive generations adopted more and more features from Standard English, causing dialectalisation. Books, magazines, and newspapers written in English are available in many countries around the world, and English is the most commonly used language in the sciences with Science Citation Index reporting as early as 1997 that 95% of its articles were written in English, even though only half of them came from authors in Englishspeaking countries.

A sociolinguistic perspective in the analysis of English textbooks: Development of a checklist

This study aims to suggest a checklist for teachers and researchers to analyze English as a second or foreign language textbooks from a sociolinguistic perspective. In the literature there is not a checklist or framework by which English textbooks can be evaluated considering the sociolinguistics issues raised in this study. After obtaining expert opinion and a piloting on 8 textbooks used in state schools in Turkey, a checklist consisting 6 criteria was suggested. Then, the check list was applied on the 9th grade English book ReLearn (Karamil & Birincioglu Kaldar, 2019) used in state schools in Turkey to demonstrate how the checklist can be utilized. The findings suggest that from a sociolinguistic perspective, the book in focus occasionally conforms to the sociolinguistic concerns while it needs some qualitative improvements. Improvements in providing genuine speakers of non-native and non-standard accents of English rather than using standard accent vocalizations for the speakers that are depicted as non-natives can be a primary suggestion and at the same time, the textbook should focus on different ways of life and perspectives instead of mostly providing intercultural knowledge such as cities or historic places. Finally, the textbook should pay more attention to the linguistic ecology in Turkey and adjust its contents so as to compensate for the foreign language status of English in Turkey. Accordingly, this study contributes to the literature by providing a checklist to evaluate textbooks systematically with regard to essential sociolinguistic issues and it demonstrates the application of the checklist.

How accent and gender influence perceptions of competence and warmth in the medical profession

Previous research has shown that we evaluate social categories differently based on the two fundamental dimensions of competence and warmth. Findings indicate that doctors, men and standard accents are perceived as more competent, while nurses, women and regional accents are perceived as warmer. In a short experiment manipulating gender (man; woman), occupation (doctor; nurse) and accent (Standard British English; regional accent), participants rated the targets on perceived competence, warmth and status. The main results showed that doctors were rated as more competent providing they spoke using Standard British English, and warmer, as long as they spoke with a regional accent. This poses a potential problem, as doctors need to be perceived as competent in their diagnoses and treatment decisions, but also warm in their communication of important and sensitive information. The implications of these findings are discussed in order to highlight the importance of using multiple social categories to represent the complexity of everyday interactions.

A Descriptive Study of Standard Dialect and Western Dialect of Odia Language in Terms of Linguistic Items

A Descriptive Study of Standard Dialect and Western Dialect of Odia Language in Terms of Linguistic Items

EmoTan: enhanced flashcards for second language vocabulary learning with emotional binaural narration

We report on the design and evaluation of a flashcard application, enhanced with emotional binaural narration to support second language (L2) vocabulary learning. Typically, the voice narration used in English vocabulary learning is recorded by native speakers with a standard accent to ensure accurate pronunciation and clarity. However, a clear but monotonous narration may not always aid learners in retaining new vocabulary items in their semantic memory. As such, enhancing textual flashcards with emotional narration in the learner’s native language can foster the retention of new L2 words in episodic rather than semantic memory as greater emotive expression reinforces episodic memory retention. We evaluated the effects of binaural emotive narration with traditional textual flashcards on L2 word retention (immediate and delayed) in laboratory experiments with native Japanese-speaking English learners. Our results suggest that the learners were able to retain approximately 60% more L2 words long-term with the proposed approach compared to traditional flashcards.

Using an E-book in the secondary English classroom: Effects on EFL reading and listening

This study investigated the effects of incorporating e-books into instructional material on reading and listening development among secondary school students with different levels of English proficiency. The experimental group utilized an e-book in regular English class, and the control group used a print version with the same content. An achievement test and focus-group interview followed the six-week e-book intervention. The test results showed that the e-book had a positive impact on listening comprehension, particularly for low-proficiency students. For these students, multimedia input combined with a standard accent seemed more effective for the development of listening skills than access to only the foreign-accented English spoken by the teacher. Furthermore, the use of visual aids, such as images and captions, might support listening comprehension by helping the students visualize auditory input and providing contextual information. Audio-only input might not be enough for low-proficiency students, who have relatively limited capability to recognize words from speech. With regard to reading, the e-book intervention resulted in higher test scores compared to the print book, but the between-group difference did not reach statistical significance. Possible reasons include a small sample size in each proficiency group as well as technical restrictions and distraction caused by multimedia material. The interview data indicates that the use of technology was not perceived as particularly beneficial for learning. Instead, diverse classroom activities and interactions were considered more important than the technology itself to draw students’ attention and sustain their motivation. Pedagogical implications of the results are discussed.

Learners’ attitudes towards the recognition and development of isiBhaca in the education space in Umzimkhulu, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Attitudes towards varieties of a language have been an issue in educational contexts. For example, it is generally said that societies have a positive attitude towards the standard variety and a negative attitude towards the non-standard varieties of a language. The attitudes towards language varieties can affect their use in education and can have an impact on learners’ learning and achievement. In some contexts, learners hold a view that dialect-speaking learners have lower academic potential than learners speaking the standard dialect. The learners’ attitudes have significant implications for the use of dialects in the classroom as it can determine the value and emphasis given to the dialect in education. Therefore, this article establishes the attitudes held by learners towards the recognition and development of isiBhaca in the education space in Umzimkhulu. Using mixed methods, the study followed a survey research design. Data were gathered from 128 purposively selected learners from Grades 6 and 7 at six schools in Umzimkhulu. Mean scores about the belief statements were calculated in order to analyse the quantitative data, whereas the qualitative data were analysed thematically. The study found that learners held positive attitudes towards the recognition and development of isiBhaca in the education space, although they were unsure as to whether this recognition should extend to the language being given official status in the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, where it has a significant number of home language speakers.

The interplay of the national, regional, and global in standards of English

AbstractAn accent recognition survey was designed and distributed among respondents from the anglophone Caribbean with the aim of finding out whether they can recognize different standard accents of English as spoken by newscasters from five Caribbean countries, namely Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. The results revealed that there is a general difficulty in placing Caribbean newscaster accents in the correct country. The only exception was a Trinidadian accent that was recognized in 60 per cent of all cases. The results suggest that in the context of newscaster accents, recognizable national standard varieties are the exception. This paper also introduces the idea that to some extent, standard accents of English in the Caribbean might be recognizable on a subregional level.