SpeechDat AT: Telephone speech databases for Austrian German

We present two telephone speech databases for Austrian German. The databases contain one thousand calls each, from the fixed and from the mobile telephone network. Speakers were chosen to assure a representative distribution over accent regions, sex, and age groups. The databases are compliant with the guidelines of the Speechdat project. We discuss the characteristics of Austrian German, describe the contents of the databases, the speaker recruitment methods, transcriptions of the calls, the phonetic lexicon, and quality assurance measures. In the end, we outline our plans to use the database for research on the pronunciation of Austrian German and automatic dialect identification. 1. Characteristics of Austrian German There are two basic theories about what is "Austrian German". One is, that the German spoken in Austria is the number of dialects within the area of the Republic of Austria, as there are quite a lot in Germany as well. The other is, that German is a language with more than one centre, a so-called pluricentric language (Muhr, 1997). This is not onl