Modeling Phonetic Variation In Pluricentric Languages: An Integrative Approach

Adaptive speech technologies offer a vehicle for representing pluricentric language variation and the description of both dominant and non-dominant speech varieties. In this article, the work of the LUPo project is described for modeling phonetic variation across national and sub-national varieties of the Portuguese language. While the motivation for this research is based around the development of high quality pronunciation lexica for a Portuguese text-to-speech system -- a goal which, itself, is aimed at facilitating the entry of lesser or undocumented variants into the digital domain -- the repercussions for pluricentricity are far reaching. We describe how systems such as LUPo can be used to model variation across phonetically similar and disparate national, sub-national, and sociolectal varieties, as well as presenting linguists with a means of testing and observing notions of linguistic distance in terms of shared or innovative rules and phonetic features, and for evaluating the pulling effect of different linguistic centers. Adapted from the source document