Forensic data bank system of regional accents of German (DRUGS) (forensic speaker identification, forensic phonetics)

The present article describes the basic features of a multimedia database o f regional varieties of colloquial German (DRUGS), which has been conceived in the first instance as a tool in crime-detection for the identification of persons on the basis of their verbal behaviour. This system, which is ba sed on WINDOWS 98 and has been tested in daily forensic use for the last tw o years, has been set up as an open modular system, so that the initial emp irical basis of 182 persons from Germany, Austria and Switzerland can be en larged at will. It is possible to subject the data to phonological, morphol ogical and orthographic investigation. On a phonetic level, the data can be presented acoustically and as a pre-segmented oscillogram, which can be fu rther segmented by the user. The link to a map on which the German dialect areas are marked allows data to be drawn randomly from the places surveyed and, conversely, the geographical assignment of research results to a parti cular place among those surveyed. DRUGS has a variety of possible applicati ons in the study of linguistic variation, which can be extended still furth er through the systematic enlargement of the number and widening of the str uctural variety of the places recorded in the database.