Article published in:
Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXVII: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, Bloomington, Indiana, 2013
Edited by Stuart Davis and Usama Soltan
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 3] 2016
► pp. 187–212

Quantifying lexical and pronunciation variation between three Arabic varieties*

| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This paper reports on computational measures of linguistic variation that quantify the lexical and pronunciation variation between three varieties of Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Gulf Arabic. We provide three measures of linguistic variation; all computed based on elicitation of the Swadesh list. The first measure is the lexical variation based on the percentage of noncognate words. The second is another lexical measure that takes into account a pronunciation aspect by considering the IPA transcription of the same word list. The third is a pronunciation measure that computes the variation of the IPA transcription of the cognate words in the Swadesh list. The results of the three measures show that geographically proximate languages are also linguistically closer to each other.
Keywords: Arabic dialectology, Computational measures of linguistic variation, Lexical elicitation, linguistic distance between Arabic varietie
Published online: 26 July 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.3.09abu
References

References

Almeida, A., & Braun, A.
(1986) "Richtig" und"Falsch" in Phonetischer Transkription. Vorschläge zum Vergleich von Transkriptionen mit Beispielen aus deutschen Dialekten. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, 158-172.Google Scholar
Babitch, R.M., & Lebrun, E.
(1989) Dialectometry as computerized agglomerative hierarchical classification analysis. Journal of English Linguistics, 22(1), 83-87. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Berghel, H., & Roach, D.
(1996) An extension of Ukkonen's enhanced dynamic programming ASM algorithm. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 14(1), 94-106. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Biadsy, F., Hirschberg, J., & Habash, N.
(2009, March). Spoken Arabic dialect identification using phonotactic modeling. In Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages (pp. 53-61). Association for Computational Linguistics. Crossref
Cadora, F.J.
(1979) Interdialectal lexical compatibility in Arabic: An analytical study of the lexical relationships among the major Syro-Lebanese varieties (Vol. 11). Leiden: Brill Archive.Google Scholar
Cucchiarini, C.
(1993) Phonetic transcription: A methodological and empirical study. PhD Dissertation. Nijmegen: Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Ebobisse, C.
(1989) Dialectométrie lexicale des parlers sawabantu. Journal of West African Languages, 19(2), 57-66.Google Scholar
Elfardy, H., & Diab, M.
(2013) Sentence Level Dialect Identification in Arabic. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics , (pp. 456-461). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Elsie, R.
(1986) Dialect Relationships in Goidelic: A Study in Celtic Dialectology. Hamburg: Helmut Buske.Google Scholar
Fitch, W.M., & Margoliash, E.
(1967) Construction of phylogenetic trees. Science, 155(3760), 279-284. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gooskens, C.
(2007) The contribution of linguistic factors to the intelligibility of closely related languages. Journal of Multilingual and multicultural development, 28(6), 445-467. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gray, R.D., & Atkinson, Q.D.
(2003) Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin. Nature, 426(6965), 435-439. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gray, R.D., & Jordan, F.M.
(2000) Language trees support the express-train sequence of Austronesian expansion. Nature, 405(6790), 1052-1055. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Heeringa, W.J.
(2004) Measuring Dialect Pronunciation Differences Using Levenshtein Distance. Phd Dissertation, University of Groningen.Google Scholar
Hoppenbrouwers, C.A.J., & Hoppenbrouwers, G.A.
(2001) De indeling van de Nederlandse streektalen: dialecten van 156 steden en dorpen geklasseerd volgens de FFM. Uitgeverij Van Gorcum.Google Scholar
Kessler, B.
(1995) Computational dialectology in Irish Gaelic. In Proceedings of the seventh conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 60-66). Dublin: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc. Crossref
Kondrak, G., & Sherif, T.
(2006) Evaluation of several phonetic similarity algorithms on the task of cognate identification. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Linguistic Distances (pp. 43-50). Sydney: Association for Computational Linguistics. Crossref
Kondrak, G.
(2009) Identification of cognates and recurrent sound correspondences in word lists. Traitement automatique des langues, 50(2), 201-235.Google Scholar
Levenshtein, Vladimir I.
(1966) Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Cybernetics and Control Theory, 10(8), 707-710.Google Scholar
Navarro, G.
(2001) A guided tour to approximate string matching. ACM computing surveys (CSUR), 33(1), 31-88. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nerbonne, J., & Kretzschmar, W.
(2003) Introducing computational techniques in dialectometry. Computers and the Humanities, 37(3), 245-255. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Séguy, J.
(1973) La dialectométrie dans l’Atlas linguistique de la Gascogne. Revue de linguistique romane, 37, 1-24.Google Scholar
Serva, M., & Petroni, F.
(2008) Indo-European languages tree by Levenshtein distance. EPL (Europhysics Letters), 81(6), 68005. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ukkonen, E.
(1983) On approximate string matching. In Foundations of Computation Theory (pp. 487-495). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1985) Algorithms for approximate string matching. Information and control, 64(1), 100-118. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Valls, E., Nerbonne, J., Prokic, J., Wieling, M., Clua, E., & Lloret, M.R.
(2011) Applying the Levenshtein Distance to Catalan dialects: A brief comparison of two dialectometric approaches. Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxía, 39, 35-61.Google Scholar
Vieregge, W.H., Rietveld, A.C., & Jansen, C.
(1984) A distinctive feature based system for the evaluation of segmental transcription in Dutch. In Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 654-659). Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Wagner, H.
(1958) Linguistic atlas and survey of Irish dialects. Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies.Google Scholar
Wichmann, S., Holman, E.W., Bakker, D., & Brown, C.H.
(2010) Evaluating linguistic distance measures. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 389(17), 3632-3639. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zaidan, O.F., & Callison-Burch, C.
(2012) Arabic dialect identification. Computational Linguistics, 40(1), 171-202. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Albirini, Abdulkafi, Eman Saadah & Mohammad T. Alhawary
2020. L1 and L2 transfer to L3 in L3 and L2 learners of Standard Arabic. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10:6 ► pp. 745 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 08 june 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.