Pre-prepared Text as a Reflection of Regional Variation of Spoken Language: Data, Analysis and Applied Perspective

Abstract

Based on three selected local dialect texts, the article presents an analysis of dialect material collected through a pre-prepared standard text and explores its potential for further linguistic analysis and use in the educational process. Informants from various Slovene regions were asked to render a short text written in Standard Slovene into their local, informal linguistic codes (dialects, colloquial varieties, or urban vernaculars). The resulting recordings enable systematic phonetic transcription and subsequent linguistic analysis. The text incorporates lexical items from the grammatical section of the Questionnaire for the Slovene Linguistic Atlas (SLA), which allow for tracing the development of selected features of the initial Common Slovenian phonological system in the recorded speech samples. To date, more than fifty recordings have been collected, representing all Slovene dialect groups. The article also discusses methodological challenges related to defining an optimal phoneme set and selecting appropriate lexical material to ensure effective recognition of dialectal variation and to the digital presentation of the collected data.