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Pronunciation Dictionaries for the Alsatian Dialects to Analyze Spelling and Phonetic Variation

This article presents new pronunciation dictionaries for the under-resourced Alsatian dialects, spoken in north-eastern France. These dictionaries are compared with existing phonetic transcriptions of Alsatian, German and French in order to analyze the relationship between speech and writing. The Alsatian dialects do not have a standardized spelling system, despite a literary history that goes back to the beginning of the 19th century. As a consequence, writers often use their own spelling systems, more or less based on German and often with some specifically French characters. But none of these systems can be seen as fully canonical. In this paper, we present the findings of an analysis of the spelling systems used in four different Alsatian datasets, including three newly transcribed lexicons, and describe how they differ by taking the phonetic transcriptions into account. We also detail experiments with a grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) system trained on manually transcribed data and show that the combination of both spelling and phonetic variation presents specific challenges.