I would like to know the relative frequency of phonemes in Indian languages whose sript is basically very close to Devanagiri. We need this data to make a pronunciation based keyboard layout for Indian languages (and we would prefer to keep almost same layout for different languages).
Most data available from surveys deal with printed characters (and often ignore vowel symbols like ी
), making it really difficult to get the frequency of phonemes. To make it clear, both frequency of इ and frequency of ी are counted together as frequency of 'phoneme इ'. The most difficult part of this task is counting frequency of अ
(example: the word कली contributes 1 to frequency of क्, 1 to अ, 1 to ल्,and 1 to इ).
My guess is that अ
is the most frequent phoneme across Indian languages (that essentially use Devanagiri sript). To the best of my knowledge, the second most frequent phoneme varies. For example, it could be उ
in Telugu and ऒ
in Bengali.
Are there good sources to get information on frequency of phonemes in Indian languages (or corpus that could be used to obtain such information)?
(Online) resources known to us are given below.
Hindi: https://www.sttmedia.com/characterfrequency-hindi
Telugu: https://foaum.org/mjo/sarala/Telugu/SaralaTelugu-2.2/DocumentationSarala%20Ergonomic%20Keyboards%20-%20Telugu%20-%20Research%20Paper.pdf
Bengali: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220485524_Smart_Bengali_Cell_Phone_Keypad_Layout (?)
Malayalam: https://sites.google.com/site/personaltesting1211/scoring-matrices-for-complete-malayalam-characters
Other than checking frequency of each language, is there a better way?
Is there a way to find relative frequency of phonemes across Indian languages (that basically use Devnagiri script)?