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About Page: Further Info
Welcome to Sound Comparisons, a website structure for exploring diversity in phonetics across language families from around the world.
We already cover hundreds of regional languages, dialects and accents across various language families from Europe and South America:
- in Europe: the Romance, Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Celtic families, and accents of English
- in the Andes: the Quechua, Aymara, Uru and Mapudungun families
- in Brazil: a pilot project on ten indigenous languages of Brazil.
Just hover the mouse over any map or table view to hear instantaneously the different pronunciations of the same 100-250 words [‘cognate’] across that family, recorded in our fieldwork campaigns.
These databases serve as input to linguistic research to measure how phonetic divergence arose through the histories of these language families (see Heggarty et al. 2010).
Our website offers powerful tools for linguist researchers (to search and filter the database, download all detailed phonetic transcriptions and sound files, create citable links, etc.), but is also multilingual and user-friendly for the general public who actually speak all of these languages, many of them endangered.
N.B.: Sound Comparisons formerly hosted three other components, but these were removed when the project left the DLCE department at MPI-SHH in Jena, and transferred to the corresponding ‘Voices’ websites at the three links below. These were the components on:
- the many Austronesian languages of Vanuatu
- the Mixe-Zoque language family in Mexico
- various language families in West Papua.