The Pronouncing Dictionary of Austrian German (AGPD) and the Austrian Phonetic Database (ADABA): Report on a large Phonetic Resources Database of the three Major Varieties of German

Abstract

The paper gives a comprehensive overview over the results, the concepts and the methods which were developed and used to create the Pronouncing Dictionary of Austrian German (ÖAWB) and the Austrian Pronouncing Database ADABA. The ÖAWB contains 42,000 entries which are based on a large audio corpus of 75,964 realisations of two model speakers each from Austria, Germany and Switzerland. The ADABA database provides 9 different ways to search the data. It also contains 24 model texts and another 30 texts showing linguistic and phonetic variation in Austria and in the other German speaking countries. The codification of Austrian standard pronunciation was based on the concept of German as a pluricentric language and on the concept of “media presentation language”. Austrian pronunciation forms are presented in parallel with those of Germany and Switzerland to allow the comparison of differences between linguistically close national varieties of a language. The paper also gives a detailed characterisation of the software (transcriber, database) which was developed during the project that was supported by the Austrian national broadcasting corporation ORF and the University for Music and Dramatic Arts in Graz. Some of the software and the data can be obtained from the web site www.adaba.at.

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