The influence of external factors in the syllabe duration

The aim of this study is to analyse the influence of external factors like the diastratic, diastopic and diaphasic variations in the syllable duration in Euskera. To that end a corpus of 20,302 syllables have been analysed. This corpus is comprised by two text types ―one read and one spontaneous― produced by 100 speakers of the language, with Euskera as the mother tongue in some cases and Spanish and French in others and from all the territories of the Basque country. The results of different analysis can be classified into three groups: (1) there are statistically significant differences concerning genre and the mother tongue of the informants. (2) The type of text affects the syllable duration and it is statistically significant too, and (3) the geographical origin of the speakers affects the syllable duration. The continental Basque country is the place with the longest syllables.