Colloque Didier Demolin 2023 - Hans Van de Velde, "Rhotic present for Didier: an automatic tool for the transcription of r"

Rhotics display a large amount of variation, both between and within languages. Consequently, r-sounds often show up as sociolinguistic variables between and within speech communities. Until the 1990’s, sociolinguists mainly worked with broad categories, such as alveolar vs. uvular or full (whatever that may be) vs. reduced vs. deleted. However, in work on Dutch, the need was felt for a more fine-grained approach to identify the numerous variants and to understand their relationship in order to get a grip on processes of language variation and change in past and present. Not surprisingly, if there are complex problems and ‘bizar’ sounds, Didier Demolin shows up, in all corners of the world. In 2001 he presented his first phonetic and phonological insights of r in Belgian French (Demolin 2001). For more than 20 years Didier and I have been working on Dutch r and discussing the relationship between alveolar and uvular trills. Finally, we think to understand the articulatrory and acoustic mechanisms underlying the change of r->R (Van de Velde & Demolin 2021, Demolin & Van de Velde submitted).

Sebregts (2015) distinguished 20 variants in Dutch, after a time-consuming transcription process combining perceptual and acoustic cues. The data set contains 22000 items equally distributed over 408 speakers from four urban centres in Flanders and six in the Netherlands. This data set and machine learning techniques will be used to develop and test a tool for the automatic classification of r-variants, that will be presented on the occasion of this symposium.

References
– Demolin, Didier (2001). Some phonetic and phonological observations concerning /R/ in Belgian French. In Hans Van de Velde et Roeland Van Hout (eds.). ‘r-atics: Sociolinguistic, phonetic and phonological characteristics of /r/, 63-73. Bruxelles: Etudes & Travaux – ILVP/ULB.
– Sebregts, Koen. 2015. The sociophonetics and phonology of Dutch r. LOT.
– Van de Velde, Hans & Didier Demolin. 2021. From alveolar [r] to uvular [R]: The symbiosis of dialectology, sociolinguistics, phonetics and phonology to explain sound change in progress. In Adolfo Arejita (ed.), Aniztasuna: Hizkeren berba-mintzoak, 289-304. Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia.