Comparative Analysis of Majority Language Influence on North Sámi Prosody Using WaveNet-Based modeling ...

• Main Authors: Hiovain, Katri, Suni, Antti, Kakouros, Sofoklis, Šimko, Juraj
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: SAGE Journals 2020
• Subjects: 200199 Communication and Media Studies not elsewhere classified; FOS: Media and communications; Education; 200399 Language Studies not elsewhere classified; FOS: Languages and literature; Sociology; FOS: Sociology; Norway; Finnmark; North Sámi; Sámi
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.25384/sage.c.5254327.v1; https://sage.figshare.com/collections/Comparative_Analysis_of_Majority_Language_Influence_on_North_S_mi_Prosody_Using_WaveNet-Based_modeling/5254327/1

The Finnmark North Sámi is a variety of North Sámi language, an indigenous, endangered minority language spoken in the northernmost parts of Norway and Finland. The speakers of this language are bilingual, and regularly speak the majority language (Finnish or Norwegian) as well as their own North Sámi variety. In this paper we investigate possible influences of these majority languages on prosodic characteristics of Finnmark North Sámi, and associate them with prosodic patterns prevalent in the majority languages. We present a novel methodology that: (a) automatically finds the portions of speech (words) where the prosodic differences based on majority languages are most robustly manifested; and (b) analyzes the nature of these differences in terms of intonational patterns. For the first step, we trained convolutional WaveNet speech synthesis models on North Sámi speech material, modified to contain purely prosodic information, and used conditioning embeddings to find words with the greatest differences ...