Language and Dialect Identification: A survey

Automatic Dialect Identification has attracted researchers in the field of speech signal processing. Dialect can be defined as the language characteristics of a specific community. As such, dialect can be recognized by a speaker´s phonemes, pronunciation, and traits such as tonality, loudness, and nasality. Being able to detect dialect accurately helps improve certain applications and services, such as Automatic Speech Recognition, remote access, e-health, e-learning, etc. Hence, working on dialect identification is more challenging than just recognizing a specific language or speech. For that reason, Dialect Identification became an important and attractive research topic. In this paper, we survey work done in dialect identification, i.e., what has been achieved in this area, and then provide an idea of what can be expected within the next few years.