This paper reports on a sociolinguistic study of the Baram language undertaken as a part of the Linguistic and Ethnographic Documentation of the Baram Language (LEDBL) project funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (HRELDP) and hosted by the Central Department of Linguistics at Tribhuvan University in Nepal. This study, carried out in different Baram-speaking areas in the Gorkha District (Western Nepal), is based on the analysis of data collected by the LEDBL team between May 2007 and April 2010, employing tools such as sociolinguistic questionnaires and Swadesh Wordlist, as well as interpersonal interactions and conversations with members of the Baram community and Baram language consultants. The main objectives of this sociolinguistic study were to: i. Identify the areas of Baram settlement; ii. Gather information about Baram speakers; iii. Collect details about various sociolinguistic aspects of the language such as the language name, language variation, knowledge and use of the language, language attitudes, vitality and maintenance, and the level of language endangerment.
Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis has come far from its primitive synthetic monotone voices to more natural and intelligible sounding voices. One of the direct applications of a natural sounding TTS systems is the screen reader applications for the visually impaired and the blind community. The Festival Speech Synthesis System uses a concatenative speech synthesis method together with the unit selection process to generate a natural sounding voice. This work primarily gives an account of the efforts put towards developing a Natural sounding TTS system for Nepali using the Festival system. We also shed light on the issues faced and the solutions derived which can be quite overlapping across other similar under-resourced languages in the region.
Nepali verb stems end with i, a, o and ʌ vowels, and voiced and voiceless consonants. From transitivity perspective, they are intransitive and transitive/ditransitive. The verbs are monosyllabic and polysyllabic from syllabicity point of view. Another feature that Nepali verbs have is sound [a] whose presence and absence has direct impact on causative stem formation. The causative stem formation is regular with some phonological restrictions; however, the passive stem formation is very productive. Negativization occurs from both prefixation and suffixation processes. On the basis of features and morphological processes, four types of stems, namely, base stem, passive stem, causative stem and causative passive stem are found.
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