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

Abstract

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 between the varieties. The subsequent exploratory analysis suggests that the differences in intonational patterns between the two Finnmark North Sámi varieties are not manifested uniformly across word types (based on part-of-speech category). Instead, we argue that the differences reflect phrase-level prosodic characteristics of the majority languages.

Dialect Identification of Spoken North Sámi Language Varieties Using Prosodic Features

“…Using somewhat different methodology to analyze partly the same spoken materials, [23] used i-vector techniques to classify North Sámi varieties based on acoustic, segmental, and phonotactic features, also focusing on the influence of the predominant majority language. The results supported their hypothesis, as well as the results of [21] and [22], suggesting that the variation in spoken North Sámi varieties is due to the majority language spoken in the given context by bilingual speakers, rather than individual variation.…”

“…While the methodologies of these papers vary, all of them have used data-driven approaches. Focusing on the spoken varieties of North Sámi, in [21] and [22] it was found that based on prosodic features (f0 and energy envelope) alone, utterances from five areal varieties were clustered following the majority language influence (Norwegian and Finnish) instead of the traditional dialectal groups. When looking at the intonational characteristics of the spoken areal varieties of North Sámi from the two countries, similarities with the respective majority languages were detected from the North Sámi intonational contours extracted from the speech materials.…”