Dialectal influences on acoustic duration of Hindi phonemes

In this paper, the authors have explored the influence of dialects on the prosodic feature represented by duration of phonemes in spoken utterances. A dialect is any distinguishable variety of a language spoken by a group of people. Dialect of a given language are the differences in speaking styles of a particular language, because of geographical and ethnic differences of the speakers. The pronunciation and choice of words during communication by individuals are governed by their exposure to native languages. Hindi is the first language for communication in India and is spoken in ten of its states. The spoken form of Hindi in different regions of these states vary from one another. These variations highly influence the prosodic structure of phonemes. In this work, six different dialects of Hindi namely, Awadhi, Bagheli, Bhojpuri, Bundeli, Haryanvi and Khariboli are considered for studying their influence on phoneme duration in spoken utterances. All attempts have been made in this study to analyze and describe the concrete correlation between phoneme lengthening in different dialects based on its position in the word at start and end. Observations show that duration of semi vowels and dental phonemes can be used for identification of Bagheli dialect, Awadhi and Bhojpuri dialects can be identified using duration of palatal sounds. Duration of velar sounds and fricatives gives clues for identification of Khariboli dialect. From the results obtained it has been analyzed that phoneme duration is an important parameter for dialect identification.