Influence of regional dialects on acoustic characteristics of Hindi vowels

Abstract

Regional dialect is a form of a language spoken by people in a particular geographical area. They can be distinguished by the pattern of pronunciation, grammar and the usage of words. Individual's regional association influences their speech characteristics. This uniqueness is supposed to be one of the major reasons for variability that can affect the performance of any speech recognizer. This paper presents an analysis of the first three formants, the fundamental frequency, and the pitch slope with the aim to investigate the influence of regional dialects. Four major Hindi dialects; Khari Boli, Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, and Bagheli were considered for this study on ten vowels. To study the co-articulation effect on vowels, this analysis was done at the word initial, middle and final positions. The database used for this work consists of read utterances of 30 male and 20 female speakers from each of the four dialects. The result of analysis indicates considerable differences between these acoustic features of four dialects.