The pronunciation resources consist of the following reference sources and programmes: (1) the Pronunciation Dictionary of Contemporary Lithuanian, (2) the Pronunciation Dictionary for Non-native Speakers, (3) the transcriber, and (4) the sound inventory.
All examples are transcribed in the characters of the International Phonetic Alphabet and presented in Computer Font Palemonas.
The materials were developed using the automated accentuation and transcription tools developed by researchers of Vytautas Magnus University. The dictionaries were reviewed, and errors were corrected manually.
The Pronunciation Dictionary of Current Lithuanian consists of 150,000 headwords. Users can search for a word by typing it in the “Search” box. The search results will provide the accented and transcribed word, its accentual class, and alternative variants.
The asterisk (*) can be used to search for word forms, for words by their endings, or for related words. For example, if you enter *ger* in the search box, the query will list all the related words in the dictionary: geras (‘good’, masculine), gera (‘good’, feminine), gerai (‘well’), gerovė (‘well-being’), and so on.
The Pronunciation Dictionary for Non-native Speakers consists of almost 6,000 most frequent words in the Pedagogic Corpus. In addition, some proper names and other words relevant to non-native speakers are included.
For each headword, the dictionary provides its accentual class, an audio file, alternative accentuation variants (if available), and the accentuation of more frequent forms of the word. If no additional forms are provided, this indicates that no other forms of the headword occurred in the corpus. Morphological features are indicated only next to ambiguous word forms (that is, when homonyms are available). In addition, only the most necessary characteristics are indicated, e.g. for the noun žmonõs [ʒmoː²ˈnoːs], only the number (sg.) and case (gen.) are noted.
The sound recordings were made by Prof. Dr. Vidas Kavaliauskas, a highly experienced teacher of Lithuanian as a foreign language. Being well familiar with the features of Lithuanian sounds relevant to non-native speakers, he focused on these particular aspects when recording the words.
In this dictionary, users can (1) search for a word by entering it in the “Search” box, (2) search for words by alphabet (select an item from the alphabetical list), and (3) view the entire list and select a word or words from it. Users can also create a list of words and download it.
In the transcriber, users can type or paste text in the box “Untranscribed word or text” on the left hand-side of the browser window. The transcription will appear on the right side (“Transcribed word or text”). The transcribed text can be downloaded in text format.
Please note that in Lithuanian words and their forms can be highly ambiguous; besides, new words and borrowings keep entering the language, and new accentual variants are appearing. Therefore, it is recommended to treat the automatically accentuated and transcribed variants with caution and to check dictionaries, textbooks, and manuals in case of doubt.
To search the Speech Corpus, you should type the word you are looking for in the search box. The search results will display different prosodic variants of this word (its stress and accent), e.g. nãmo and namõ. For further search, you can select any of these variants or all of them.
The search results for the items selected will provide all the occurrences of the search word(s) (concordance lines) listed alphabetically and according to prosodic units. The search words appear in the middle of the line together with the phrase in which they are used. You can listen to the pronunciation of the search word (by clicking on the word) or the whole phrase (by clicking on the speaker icon).
You can use the asterisk (*) to search for different forms of the same word or related words. For example, the search for *nam* will list all the forms of the word in the Speech Corpus, e.g. namai, namais, namams, namie, etc.
The Speech Corpus consists of samples of radio and television shows, radio performances, and recordings of fairy tales.
The pronunciation resources were developed by Prof. Dr. Asta Kazlauskienė (Research Team Coordinator), Prof. Dr. Gailius Raškinis, Dr. Airenas Vaičiūnas, and Dr. Sigita Dereškevičiūtė. The sounds recordings for the Pronunciation Dictionary for Non-native Speakers were made by Prof. Dr. Vidas Kavaliauskas.
Recording studio technician: Matas Jančauskas.
Web Developer: Petras Pauliūnas.