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Our efforts to create a speech database for the Buryat language are being made
with due account for its regional varietals. Most of Russia’s Buryat speakers
live in the Republic of Buryatia, the Trans-Baikal region (the Aginskoye area),
and in the Irkutsk Region’s Ust-Ordynsky area; there are also large Buryat
communities in Mongolia (specifically in the Dornod, Khentii, Selenge, and
Khovsgol provinces, known locally as “aimags”) as well as in northeastern
China (Hulunbuir, in the Inner Mongolia Autonomy). The Buryat ethnicity’s
spread across vast territories in three countries, as well as its lack of
homogeneity, has resulted in the language’s broad dialectal variation of every
level: segmental, suprasegmental, morphological, and lexical.
The project’s ambition is to preserve the distinctive regional features of the
Buryat language, designing strategies for the creation of oral speech databases,
and systematizing and putting into circulation the accumulated audio content.
Samples of Buryat speech featured on the database should be used for further
exploration of its phonetic and prosodic structure and its morphological and
lexical characteristics.
Corpus methods appear the most appropriate for the purpose as they allow to
comprehensively represent a large, versatile array of data – with due account
for the various characteristics of speech fragments, ranging from acoustic to
discoursive.
The would-be database is to include separate words, sentences with varied
communicative purport, and coherent texts. The speech signals will each
come with a transliteration and a phonetic/prosodic transcription. There will also
be notes on idiosyncratic or unusual pronounciations and on emotionally coloured
speech fragments, along with some background information on the speaker.
The project involves recording speech samples and arranging them in the form
of audio files. The technical groundwork will consist in the digitization of audio
recordings and their multi-layer segmentation (into phrases, syntagmata,
words, and sounds), along with textological decoding.
As a result, each recording should be provided with an audio file carrying various
segmentation markups, as well as with textual files that are transliterations or
phonetic conversions of the recorded material.
Fellows of the Mongol, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies Institute’s Linguistics
Department have by now assembled ample audio content on the standard
Buryat language and its dialects, as well as on other Mongol languages, such
as Daghur, Baerhu, and Khalkha Mongolian. Systematized, homogenized and
arranged in a database, that material will allow to preserve the distinctive
speech character of regional Buryat communities, which is now being erased
by the growing influence of media language as well as by the shrinking use of
the Buryat language itself owing to extralinguistic factors.
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