Sociolinguistic Variation in Loanword Pronunciation in Czech

Abstract

This article is a sociolinguistic study of the impact of four independent variables (age, sex, education and region of origin) on loanword pronunciation in Czech. The data were elicited in an empirical study carried out in 2014, in which 300 native speakers of Czech were recorded reading 300 loanwords in short sentences. Our focus in this article is on a sample of these loanwords that were identified to have two ‘majority’ pronunciation variants (i.e. variants for which 100 or more tokens were recorded) and we use sociolinguistic methods to uncover patterns of variation between different groups of speakers.