Digital Investigation of Accent Variation in Sindhi Dialects

For the last decade, Sindhi has been provided with a great margin of research efforts especially in computational applications. But, the accents applied through the province have not undergone the research experiments; however, it is mandatory requisite to develop such applications before going through the speech processing applications, i.e., Text to Speech Synthesis. More than six dialects of Sindhi are found within the province, among which the dialect of Central Region is mostly applied in formal writings and communication media. The other dialects are usually used in informal spoken for routine communication. Sindhi dialects vary from one to other in terms of phonology, morphology, and syntax. The purpose of this research study is to digitally investigate the accents of Sindhi language in three dialects of Sindhi which are Lassi, Laarri and Vicholi. The acoustic digital investigation has drawn differences among the dialects on the grounds of vowel duration, pause usage, F0 peak alignment, F0 excursion size and F0 contour shape. This paper presents the calculated means values of vowel duration and its rise size implemented on the eight different classes of syllables. Empirical variations have successfully been witnessed among the taken dialects.