Phoneme frequency lists and charts.

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Nachtuil
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Joined: 21 Jul 2016 00:16

Phoneme frequency lists and charts.

Post by Nachtuil »

I want to start collecting resources showing how frequently different phonemes occurs in the usage of different languages. For example, how often English uses /t/ in comparison to say Japanese. The links below have different sample types and different methodologies so their accuracy and utility is inconsistent. I am interested in it out of curiosity. I may update this once in a while if I run into something. If anyone posts something I'll be happy to add it to this first post.

There is a lot out there indicating how frequently different phonemes occur int he inventories of different languages. In case that is why you're here, the following two links are useful:

Phoible's list of phoneme frequencies in inventories:http://phoible.org/parameters
This is also noteworthy: http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=44604

List proper:

Arabic. PDF.
"Statistical Analysis of Arabic Phonemes for Continuous Arabic Speech Recognition". Khalid M.O Nahar, Moustafa Elshafei, Wasfi G. Al-Khatib, Husni Al-Muhtaseb. 2012
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kh ... nition.pdf
Good data, unfortunate use of non-ipa characters.

Cantonese. PDF
"FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE OF CANTONESE WORD INITIALS,
FINALS, AND TONES". Manwa L. Ng*, Irene C. L. Kwok. Unknown year.
https://www.internationalphoneticassoci ... 4_0797.pdf

English, unknown source. Jpeg format: https://cmloegcmluin.files.wordpress.co ... onness.png

English and Standard Persian. PDF
"Frequency System of Phonemes: Contrastive Analysis of Common
Standard Persian and English Consonants in Context-Based Corpora" Ali Mansouri Nejad
& Mahmoud Qaracholloo. 2012
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do ... 1&type=pdf
Document pages 5 to 9. Page # 80 to 84

Hungarian. PDF
"Vowel Frequency in Hungarian". John Lotz. 1952.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1 ... 2.11659435

Japanese. PDF
"Frequency of occurrence for units of phonemes, morae, and syllables appearing in a lexical corpus of a Japanese newspaper". KATSUO TAMAOKA, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan and SHOGO MAKIOKA Osaka Women’s University, Osaka, Japan. 2004
http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~ktamaok ... M2004a.pdf
Numerous charts through document.

Korean. Hosted on google books. Incomplete document.
"The sounds of Korean". Jiyoung Shin, Jieun Kiaer, Jaeeun Cha. Cambridge university press. 2013
https://books.google.ca/books?id=XMYgAw ... &q&f=false
See page 121 and the few after.


Malayam. PNG on a website
"FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE OF PHONEMES IN MALAYALAM". N. Sreedevi, Irfana, M. An abstract.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/216560806/Fr ... -Malayalam
Charts at various points in document.

Marathi. PDF
"Phonotactic frequencies in Marathi". Kelly Harper Berkson and Max Nelson. Indiana University BLoomington, Indiana. 2015 or later.
https://www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp/wp/arti ... ad/185/228
Some really good stuff in here.

Nko. PDF.
"Phoneme distribution, syllabic structure, and tonal patterns in Nko texts ". Andrij Rovenchak, Ivan Franko National Univerisity of Lviv, Ukraine. 2011
http://llacan.vjf.cnrs.fr/PDF/Mandenkan ... enchak.pdf

Romanian. PDF
"Phoneme Type Frequency in Romanian". Margaret E. L. Renwick. Cornell University, mer56@cornell.edu. 2011.
https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewco ... ntext=pwpl

Spanish (American). PDF
"Frequency of occurance of Phonemes in American Spanish". Miguelina Guirao et Maria A. Garcia Jurado. 1990. La phonétique. Volume 19, numéro 2, 1990 https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/rql/19 ... 2680ar.pdf
Page 4 and 5 of document. Page # 137 and 138

Spanish (Castilian)
"Developing a Phonemic and Syllabic Frequency Inventory for Spontaneous Spoken Castilian Spanish and their Comparison to Text-Based Inventories". Antonio Moren Sandoval, Doroteo T. Toledano, Raúl de la Torre, Marta Garrote and
José M. Guirao. 2005 or later.
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lr ... _paper.pdf


Unprocessed links for later analysis.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/1 ... 195596.pdf
http://speechpro.com/files/en/media/pub ... sc2011.pdf
http://www.thomastsoi.com/wp-content/do ... %20SLA.pdf
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lr ... _paper.pdf

Edit: Added one for Arabic, Marathi, Nko, Hungarian, Romanian, Castilian Spanish.
Edit: Found one for Korean.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: Phoneme frequency lists and charts.

Post by eldin raigmore »

I appreciate this post! I think it belongs on the “Resources” thread.
Nachtuil
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Joined: 21 Jul 2016 00:16

Re: Phoneme frequency lists and charts.

Post by Nachtuil »

Thanks Eldin! I am really glad you appreciate it :)

I thought about it but don't like the idea of it being buried in a thread when ever I get around to updating it. That said, maybe if I give up on the idea of updating it I can throw its contents in a post there. It may well belong in the tech and share forum however.
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