Analysis of Shibboleths in Two Major Dialects of Telugu: A Phonetic Analysis

Speech not just gives the linguistic information but is often remarkable source of indexical information as well. There are several cues in speech which give away the cultural, religious, socio, economic and geographical information of the speaker. This identification is robustly facilitated through a speech feature often referred to as ‘shibboleth’: a sound, word or phrase that is typical of a speech community. This paper tries to identify the shibboleths, at the level of sounds, of two dialects of Telugu language (Telangana and Andhra). This has relevance to forensic speaker identification (identifying the criminals based on their phonetic features of speech) and LADO (linguistic analysis for the determination of origin) in the case of asylum seekers. Results indicate that there are several shibboleths at the phonetic level that can be used reliably to distinguish the speakers of one dialect from the other. Keywords— Telugu, Telangana dialect, Andhra dialect, Shibboleth, LADO, Forensic speaker identification.