Development of the S iberian I ngrian F innish Speech Corpus (2022)

Abstract: In this paper we present the speech corpus for the Siberian Ingrian Finnish language. The speech corpus includes audio data, annotations, software tools for data-processing, two databases and a web application. We have published part of the audio data and annotations. The software tool for parsing annotation files and feeding a relational database is developed and published under a free license. A web application is developed and available. At this moment, about 300 words and 200 phrases can be displayed using this web application.

## introduction many of endangered languages have the following specific features: (i) there are no writing system and stable orthography; (ii) there are very few available speech data and texts. these features should be considered when working on speech corpora. since we plan to document and revitalize several endangered languages from our region, we are developing software -the lexeme.net system, at www.lexeme.net that is adapted to our requirements and goals. our requirements: (i) all source code and data should be accessible on github and licensed under one of a free license; (ii) speech corpora should be available to users via the internet without installing additional software; (iii) speech corpora should be convenient not only for linguists, but also for speakers of endangered languages, language activists and software developers; (iv) speech corpora should have a powerful system of requests to data (for example, search by grammatical categories, regular expression search). at present, there are solutions that meet these requirements: the "tsakorpus" corpus platform 1 (for example, the project inel uses the "tsakorpus" corpus platform @xcite ), kwaras and namuti @xcite , lingsync & the online linguistic database @xcite , kratylos @xcite , the iath elan text-sync tool @xcite . since we wanted a very flexible solution, we decided to develop own project. we chose the .net framework 2 and microsoft sql server 3 for the implementation of the project. siberian ingrian finnish was chosen as the first endangered language for the lexeme.net system. we briefly review the siberian ingrian finnish in section 2. we describe the design of the siberian ingrian finnish speech corpus in section 3. in section 3 we describe the general structure of the speech corpus, annotation tiers, the data model of the fieldwork database and the web application. ## an overview of the siberian ingrian finnish language the siberian ingrian finnish language is an ingrian finnish -ingrian (izhorian) mixed language. the ancestors of the speakers of siberian ingrian finnish spoke lower luga ingrian finnish (so-called the dialect of the kurkola peninsula) and lower luga ingrian varieties @xcite . they migrated from the lower luga area to siberia in 1803-1804. siberian ingrian finnish (russian: сибирский ингерманландский идиом) is the term introduced by d.v. sidorkevich. d.v. sidorkevich who researched and documented siberian ingrian finnish @xcite in 2008-2014. the language was also studied by n.v. kuznetsova @xcite and m.z. muslimov. in 2022, there is still a group of people of elder generation who use siberian ingrian finnish in the domestic sphere of communication in ryzhkovo settlement (krutinsky district of omsk oblast). the villagers of ryzhkovo also use siberian ingrian finnish for communication with their relatives from estonia by phone. there is also a small group of people in omsk who use this language occasionally. according to our estimates, about 15 native speakers of this language now live in russia and estonia. the number of semi-speakers is about 30-60. siberian ingrian finnish has a number of distinctive features such as word-final vowel reduction and the emergence of a large number of consonant phonemes. the language has no writing system, stable orthography and texts. ## the current status of the creation of the speech corpus and conclusion at this moment, about 300 words (the number of individual pronunciations) and 200 phrases in audio files have been annotated. all these words and phrases were collected from 4 speakers of siberian ingrian finnish. these words are mostly from the 200-word swadesh list as well as the other basic lexicon. these 300 words and 200 phrases can be played in our web-application, and the web-application also displays information from the annotations associated with these audio fragments. the following results have been achieved: after creating the speech corpus for siberian ingrian finnish, we plan to start creating a speech corpus for the siberian tatar language using the software described above.