gender voice variants

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Wed Dec 19 20:12:33 CET 2012


In the simplest cases, such as English, the exact same text might be 
spoken by a male or female. A use case has been stated to identify 
different multimedia resources for this. (Karen is right: BCP 47 isn't 
just for Web pages and screen readers.) This simple concept is uniform 
across languages, and limited to non-written text, and if coded, would 
definitely call for generic variants.

There are more complicated cases where the text may change by simple 
inflections. Michael mentioned "obrigado" in Portuguese (in the context 
of saying "don't tag this") and Karen mentioned "hotový" in Czech. I 
don't know if this concept, if coded, is uniform enough across languages 
to permit generic variants; obviously the exact changes differ from one 
language to the next, but that is also true for "zh-Latn-pinyin" versus 
"bo-Latn-pinyin".

The Japanese or Yanyuwa "women's speech" cases are more complicated yet, 
and I think these cases, if coded, should be language-specific variants.

None of these variant subtags would likely be mainstream, but that is 
true for variant subtags in general.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­ 



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