A New Dataset for Tonal and Segmental Dialectometry from the Yue- and Pinghua-Speaking Area
This paper introduces a newly digitized dataset from Yue- and Pinghua-speaking areas in Southern China, modeling tonal variation across over 100 dialects to explore linguistic differences, highlighting the underexplored role of tones in quantitative language comparison.
Abstract
Traditional dialectology or dialect geography is the study of geographical variation of language. Originated in Europe and pioneered in Germany and France, this field has predominantly been focusing on sounds, more specifically, on segments. Similarly, quantitative approaches to language variation concerned with the phonetic level are in most cases focusing on segments as well. However, more than half of the world’s languages include lexical tones (Yip, 2002). Despite this, tones are still underexplored in quantitative language comparison, partly due to the low accessibility of the suitable data. This paper aims to introduce a newly digitised dataset which comes from the Yue- and Pinghua-speaking areas in Southern China, with over 100 dialects. This dataset consists of two parts: tones and segments. In this paper, we illustrate how we can computationaly model tones in order to explore linguistic variation. We have applied a tone distance metric on our data, and we have found that 1) dialects also form a continuum on the tonal level and 2) other than tonemic (inventory) and tonetic differences, dialects can also differ in the lexical distribution of tones. The availability of this dataset will hopefully enable further exploration of the role of tones in quantitative typology and NLP research.
Citation
@article{sung2024,
author = {Sung, Ho Wang Matthew and Prokic, Jelena and Chen, Yiya},
title = {A {New} {Dataset} for {Tonal} and {Segmental} {Dialectometry}
from the {Yue-} and {Pinghua-Speaking} {Area}},
journal = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
date = {2024-03-22},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigtyp-1.3},
langid = {en}
}