Making speech technologies available in (Serviko) Romani language

Abstract

The language of Romanies seems not to be commercially interesting for big companies. Not only the majority of people from Roma community are very poor, but the language itself is very difficult to work on, because it is extremely rich in local dialects and the standardized form that would be accepted by majority of Romanies does not exist. The Romani language belongs to the "digitally endangered languages". The paper gives a short description of Romani language in Slovakia. An effort to design basic tools needed to start using Romani speech and language in computer technologies is presented. As the authors are familiar with speech synthesis, they have chosen building several types of speech synthesizers in Romani as a pilot project. The paper shortly summarizes some facts on Romani orthography, phonetics, and prosody. The design of text corpus, diphone set, and speech database is described. The application part of the paper presents Romani synthesizers - both diphone and unit-selection, some of which are bilingual (Romani-Slovak). The demo of the synthesis can be tried on the authors' web-page. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.