Abstract
The Zapotec language, as well as many other prehispanic languages in Mexico, is endangered for many reasons including a lack of use by the younger population who prefer to speak Spanish instead, and by the dying out of older native speakers. In this paper an analysis of the Choapam variant of Zapotec is presented; a list of words in this Zapotec was recorded, and a time and formant analysis was carried out in order to obtain basic information used to describe the language. The formant analysis focused on the vowels in the language, due complications which arise with them, and gives a first classification of them. Some of the difficulties experienced in the study, which are similar to those encountered with many other endangered languages, are detailed. Although this is a first approach to these languages analysis, it is hoped that the use of this information will contribute to further efforts aimed at helping preserve the language.
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© 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Oliva-Juarez, G., MartÃnez-Licona, F., MartÃnez-Licona, A., Goddard-Close, J. (2013). An Analysis of Speech Signals of the Choapam Variant Zapotec Language. In: Železný, M., Habernal, I., Ronzhin, A. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8113. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01931-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01931-4_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-01930-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-01931-4
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