Effect of Tonal Features on Various Dialectal Variations of Punjabi Language

Punjabi is tonal as well as under resource language among all the Indo Aryan languages of the Indo-European family. A vast number of variations in language lead to challenges while designing an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system. Therefore, it turned out to be a matter of extreme concern to study the essential features such as tone of the language for designing an effective ASR. This paper lays its focus upon the variation of tonal characteristics of Punjabi dialect. The speech corpus has been collected from native speakers of Punjab (including all the various dialects) and also covering the areas under the Himachali belt of Punjab. The result analysis shows that tonal words and dialectal word information caste a major impact on the information conveyed by the speaker. The analyzed data shows pitch variations in tonal words that vary from region to region. The experiments are performed by using Praat toolkit for calculating F0 value; then depending upon the pitch and frequency variations, we have studied that tonal words show dialectal variations when the similar sentence is spoken by speakers of different regions.