The ManDi Corpus: A Spoken Corpus of Mandarin Regional Dialects

In the present paper, we introduce the ManDi Corpus, a spoken corpus of regional Mandarin dialects and Standard Mandarin. The corpus currently contains 357 recordings (about 9.6 hours) of monosyllabic words, disyllabic words, short sentences, a short passage and a poem, each produced in Standard Mandarin and in one of six regional Mandarin dialects: Beijing, Chengdu, Jinan, Taiyuan, Wuhan, and Xi’an Mandarin from 36 speakers. The corpus was collected remotely using participant-controlled smartphone recording apps. Word- and phone-level alignments were generated using Praat and the Montreal Forced Aligner. The pilot study of dialect-specific tone systems showed that with practicable design and decent recording quality, remotely collected speech data can be suitable for analysis of relative patterns in acoustic-phonetic realization. The corpus is available on OSF (https://osf.io/fgv4w/) for non-commercial use under a CC BY-NC 3.0 license.