Frequency of Occurrence of Phonemes in Malayalam

Abstract

The knowledge of the frequency of occurrence of phonemes in a language is essential to understand the language structure. The present study aimed to obtain the frequency of occurrence of phonemes in three major regional dialects of Malayalam. Participants were fluent native speakers of Calicut, Ernakulam and Thiruvanthapuram dialects of Malayalam in the age range of 30 to 55 years. Twenty one conversation samples were recorded with seven groups from each dialect separately for 25-30 minutes. The obtained samples were transcribed and analyzed using the SALT software for obtaining frequency of phonemes. Mean and standard deviation of frequency of phonemes of all the samples were obtained. The analysis showed that there were no major differences across the dialects. Overall, the most frequently occurring vowels were /a, i, e, a.; e/ and consonants were /k, n.t,t, m/. The results obtained will help audiologists and speech language pathologists in developing and updating the existing test material for evaluating various communication disorders and also for selection of treatment targets in such populations. The study also has implications in linguistics analysis, speech synthesis experiments and development of automatic speech recognition systems.