| Summary: | In the prosody material, word accents and focus were varied and elicited using two-word phrases consisting of an amount (10, 100) and a currency ($, SEK, DM, £), i.e. numbers and currency symbols in order to avoid reading from a text. During the recording session, cards with written amounts and currency symbols were used. The subjects were asked to "read" from the cards, which always consisted of one amount card and one currency card. Sometimes a carrier phrase was used, e.g. "I want 10 $.". By switching one card at a time, the idea was to elicit focus (e.g. "I don't want 10 $, I want 100 $." or "I don't want 10 $, I want 10 £."). Every combination of cards was shown at least twice. In addition, a number of compound words were elicited by showing different money bills, e.g. 1 $, 100 SEK, etc. A third person was usually present and managing the recording equipment, but without interfering in any other way. The recordings were made in the consultant's home environment. Date of recording given is guaranteed to be correct only for year. Abstract Phonetic and phonological data on today’s Swedish dialects are scarce. The aim of this project is to record and analyze comparable speech samples from about 110 dialect areas. A central goal is to establish phonetic and phonological typologies on the basis of segmental and prosodic characteristics. The project which is scheduled to be carried out during 1998-2003 is a collaboration between the phonetics departments in Lund, Stockholm and Umeå. Method A selection of dialects was chosen in such a way as to enable phonetic and phonological analyses of a broad spectrum of segment inventories (vowels and consonants) and prosodic systems (intonation, word accent and quantity). Regionally conditioned voice qualities (phonation types) were also considered. Speech samples were collected from two groups, young and elderly. From each dialect area 3 male and 3 female speakers in an age interval from 55 to 75 were documented. The younger group consists of male and female speakers in the age interval from 20 to 30 years. The elderly informants were recruited from a rural population rooted in a traditional dialect. The younger informants were preferred to be of a similar geographical and educational background. In general, however, the younger generation had a longer formal education than the elderly generation. The contact was made via organizations which study local geography, history and folklore. The recordings took place in the informants’ homes. The recordings contained both spontaneously produced and elicited speech materials. The spontaneous material consisted of interviews with one informant at a time. The elicited material consisted of words, phrases and sentences created with the purpose of documenting dialectal variation in segmental and prosodic features. In the prosody material, word accents and focus were varied and elicited using two-word phrases consisting of an amount (10, 100) and a currency ($, SEK, DM, £), i.e. numbers and currency symbols in order to avoid reading from a text. During the recording session, cards with written amounts and currency symbols were used. The subjects were asked to "read" from the cards, which always consisted of one amount card and one currency card. Sometimes a carrier phrase was used, e.g. "I want 10 $.". By switching one card at a time, the idea was to elicit focus (e.g. "I don't want 10 $, I want 100 $." or "I don't want 10 $, I want 10 £."). Every combination of cards was shown at least twice. In addition, a number of compound words were elicited by showing different money bills, e.g. 1 $, 100 SEK, etc. A third person was usually present and managing the recording equipment, but without interfering in any other way. The recordings were made in the consultant's home environment. Swedish was spoken throughout the session Birthdate given is guaranteed to be correct only for year. The .ord files contain manual segmentation of the target words of the elicited prosody material. Words and syllables with focal accent are transcribed using upper-case letters, non-focal words and syllables using lower-case letters. The .seg files contain manual segmentation and prosodic transcription of the target phonemes in the elicited material. Stressed vowels (i.e. vowels in accented syllables) are marked with '*'.
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