The Pronouncing Dictionary of Austrian German and the other Major Varieties of German - A Phonetic Resources Database on the Pronunciation of German
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002)
Abstract
The paper gives a comprehensive overview on the project "Varieties of Austrian German - Standard pronunciation and varieties of standard pronunciation" whose primary goal is the creation of a pronouncing dictionary of Austrian German and the creation of a large data base of audio samples for research on spoken language and different forms of pronunciation in Austria. The contents of the dictionary and the database are described in detail. The project is based on the idea that German is a pluricentric language which means that German and Swiss model speaker realisations will be also included in the database alongside with the Austrian model speakers. A corpus of 86.000 words spoken by 6 model speakers and a large number of texts will be published together with the dictionary on CD-ROM in 2003. The paper also gives an overview on the theoretical and methodological foundations of the project which is supported by the Austrian national broadcasting corporation and funded by the Austrian national bank. Finally the database and the user-interface is described in detail which allows a number of different queries and will have a built-in tool for the acoustic analysis of sound files chosen by the user.