Frequency of Occurrence of Phonemes in Kannada

Abstract

Kannada if one of the four major literary languages of the Dravidian family and has a very complex range of regional social and stylistic variations: the Mysore dialect, the coastal dialect (Mangalore), the northern dialect (Dharwar) and Kalaburgi dialect (Upadhyaya, 1976). The number of phonemes and their frequency of occurrence vary across phonemes and their frequency of occurrence vary across purposes. Studies in different languages have calculated the frequency of phonemes using written source of materials. The purpose of the present study was to obtain the frequency of occurrence of various phonemes in Kannada using conversation samples. The conversation samples were transcribed using IPA transcription and was analyzed using the SALT software for obtaining frequency of phonemes. The followed by /I/, /u/, /e/, /a:/ whereas among consonants /n/ was most frequently occurring followed by /r/, /d/, /1/, /t/, /k/, /g/ and /m/. The results obtained will aid in preparing speech corpora for several research purposes and also 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 population.