A Computational Analysis of Gabon Varieties In Petya Osenova

International audience The linguistic situation in Gabon is highly com-plex as the various varieties form long chains, and multilingualism is common. Most previous classifications of Gabon varieties have used lex-ical models, a notable exception being Nurse & Philippson (2003), which involves phonological and morphological features. This paper presents a phonetic analysis of Ga-bon varieties. It applies Levenshtein analysis to obtain pronunciation distances, which are in turn analyzed using bootstrapped clustering to identify groups, including an estimation of the robustness of the clusters. On the basis of clus-tering, we obtain a graded map of varieties. The results indicate that techniques developed and proven on European languages are still use-ful when applied to Bantu in spite of its different structure and its nomadic speakers.