Diphthongization as cue for the automatic identification of British English dialects Free

The degree to which a given speaker of British English diphthongizes her/his vowels has been known for decades to be a good indicator of this speaker’s dialectal origin: for instance, some Northern varieties tend to have variants perceived as monophthongs where Standard Southern English has a perceived diphthong in the word GOAT. A portion of the recently released Accents of the British Isles database (14 dialects recorded throughout the British Isles, 20 speakers per dialect) is investigated to determine whether this view still holds at least acoustically for contemporary dialects. Several metrics (based on formant‐frequency estimation) are proposed in an attempt to capture a ‘‘degree’’ of diphthongization. In a preliminary and rather oversimplified study, the standard deviation of F2 was measured over the whole duration of the vowel in the word BOAT for all speakers and dialects. A nonparametric one‐way analysis of variance was performed to test the effect of ‘‘dialect’’ on diphthongization. The effect turned out to be significant at the 0.01 level. More elaborate procedures (including all first three formants) will be shown in the final presentation.