Fonoloogiline varieerumine eesti keeles kolme nähtuse näitel
Phonological variation in Estonian on the basis of three phenomena

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines phonological variation in Estonian, focusing on three main areas of variation: word-initial /h/, palatalization in i-stemmed words with a (CC)V̅C structure, and quantity degrees. The pronunciation fixed in the Dictionary of Standard Estonian (ÕS 2018) is subject to variation, and the variants reflected in the dictionary are not always the ones that seem to be preferred in the usage. Variation causes problems in the text to speech synthesis system, where it is necessary to give preference to one of the pronunciation variants in the text analysis process, and therefore it is important to identify which variant is more common among language users. The study is based on a reading experiments conducted with 191 informants. The article consists of two parts: a description of the speech corpus collected by experiments and an overview of the research results.The study revealed that according to our results, word-initial /h/ was pronounced 92% of the time, probably due to the formal situation of the reading experiment and written text. So it is doubtful that text-to-speech synthesis would become more natural if, in 8% of cases, the /h/ is not pronounced at the beginning of the word.Palatalization occurs among more than half of the pronunciation instances in only 5 out of the 36 words. The results confirm that the palatalization of the consonants l, n, s, t, d at the end of i-stemmed Estonian words with a (CC)V̅C structure is generally untypical. Thus, there is no reason to palatalize these words in a synthetic speech.In the case of almost 50 examined words, it was possible to determine which quantity degree (second or third) the informants preferred the most. Additionally, words were divided into eight groups according to the part of speech and word syllable structure, in order to make it possible to draw inferences about other words of the same group as well. In two groups the third quantity degree dominated, in the other two the second quantity dominated. The other four groups did not exhibit unified pronunciation patterns.

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