A Comparative Study on the Semantic Changes in Different Bengali Dialects of North and South Bengal
摘要
This study focuses on the semantic changes of words in different dialects of Bengali language, an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in Bangladesh and West Bengal. West Bengal is geographically divided into North Bengal(NB) and South Bengal(SB), with five dialects: Rarhi, Kamrupi, Varendri, Bangali, and Jharkhandi. The study compares meaning shift in these dialects. Cultural differences sometimes impact dialectal changes, as the same word with the same pronunciation holds different meanings in different regions. Words may have the same morpho-syntactic structure but they can be semantically dissimilar in grammatical components and might create ambiguity in conversations. Conceptual differences in the meaning of the same word can also occur with some meanings becoming generic or specific and some being positive or negative. The study uses a human response statistical survey to study the semantic and dialectic variation. A set of few words with distinct meanings across NB and SB were chosen, and participants were divided into two groups based on their place of residence. The questionnaire included how the participants perceived the words/phrases semantically and in terms of tenses. The study also includes recordings of a few English sentences in variations of the Bengali dialects, using focus particles to show where utterance alterations occur. Audio spectral features like spectral centroid, entropy, and flux were also measured, to identify the acoustical cues involved in the dialectal variation which ultimately manifests in the perceptual variation.