Abstract
The endangerment of minority languages has reached pandemic proportions. No country or continent is spared. The editors of Ethnologue (2019:14-15) report that 2,923 of the world’s 7,111 languages are critically endangered. McWorther (2003:257-8) adds that, statistically speaking, “A language dies roughly every two weeks.” UNESCO (2010) projects that 90% of the world’s indigenous languages will be dead by the end of 2100. In Africa alone, Kandybowicz and Torrence (2017:3) note that 201 languages of the estimated 2000 languages have already died, and 308 others are on the brink of extinction. Minority languages worldwide are in such deplorable conditions that the United Nations (UN) has sounded the alarm about this impending linguistic catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. It has declared 2022-2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL 22-32). A simpler and nimbler speech synthesis that is based on syllable concatenation is described in this paper with the hope that it can be duplicated to revitalize critically endangered languages in Africa and elsewhere.
Recommended Citation
Koffi, Ettien; FABRES, DANIEL; PINGILI, SWATHI R.; and CHAVA, GOPIKRISHNA K.
(2024)
"SPEECH SYNTHESIS BY SYLLABLE A CONCATENATION: EXPERIMENTATION WITH BETINE,"
Linguistic Portfolios: Vol. 13, Article 8.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling/vol13/iss1/8
