Phonetic analysis of Afrikaans, English, Xhosa and Zulu using South African speech databases

Abstract

We present a corpus-based analysis of the Afrikaans, English, Xhosa and Zulu languages, comparing these in terms of phonetic content, diversity and mutual overlap. Our aim is to shed light on the fundamental phonetic interrelationships between these languages, with a view to furthering progress in multilingual automatic speech recognition in general, and in the South African region in particular.