The canar-yi in the coal mine: The loss of yi in Zulu reduplication

Speakers of rural accents have been said to speak more slowly than speakers of urban accents. However, there would appear to have been no previous empirical investigation of such a claim. In the study reported here, recordings were made of 12 Orkney English speakers and 12 Edinburgh English speakers, during a reading task and in conversation with the experimenter. Measurements, in syllables per second, were made of both the Speaking Rate and the Articulation Rate (i.e. the rate calculated after excision of pauses) of each speaker in reading mode and in conversation mode. Comparison of the results for the two groups revealed no tendency for the urban (Edinburgh) speakers to speak faster than the rural (Orkney) speakers. The claim that rural speakers speak more slowly than urban speakers therefore still awaits empirical support. Some discussion is offered concerning the possible relationships among speech tempo, lifestyle and accent.

This article examines the contestation of a partially enregistered variety, namely, the “Cleveland accent” or “northern accent” in Ohio. Speaker perceptions of language variation within Ohio were collected from eighty-nine visitors to a science museum in Columbus, Ohio. Participant responses reflect Ohio’s complex dialect situation, dividing the northern and southern areas of the state out from a purportedly neutral, normative center. Accent-free speakers are positioned in central Ohio cities and presented as racially unmarked, while Southern, rural speakers and African American, young, urban speakers are presented as stigmatized and linguistically deficient Others. This stigma contrasts strikingly with the value-free discussion of otherwise unmarked speakers in northern Ohio, whose language differences, when noted, are presented less negatively, marked as less widely known, and, in some cases, downplayed as idiosyncratic variation. These results suggest that, for Ohio speakers, the North Midland/Inland North boundary is incompletely enregistered and would therefore be a promising site for the examination of enregisterment in progress and of the strategies speakers use to try to counter potential enregisterment.

Within a rural-urban contact context, the present paper investigates linguistic accommodation of rural speakers (originally from Beni Snous valley, south-west of Tlemcen-Algeria) being in frequent and regular contact with urban speakers in the neighbouring city of Tlemcen. Gender marker is the selected linguistic variable which is used to address a female person. This variable has a reduced form [-i] and a neutralised form ∅ in the speech of Tlemcen speakers. However, Beni Bahdel speakers tend to diphthongise it by adding the suffixes [-ij] and [-ej]. Thus, the aim is to examine whether these rural commuters to the city of Tlemcen have accommodated their speech to the input variant forms [-i] and gender neutralisation ∅ or they still maintain their native variant form. By means of quantitative and qualitative methods, data analysis has revealed that linguistic accommodation has been attested in the speech of these speakers. Some social factors dictate the accommodative behaviour of these rural speakers to urban speech, as women are likely to maintain their native speech while men are prone to accommodate their speech. Such linguistic behaviour is reinforced by social-psychological factors towards both their native speech and urban speech.

This study investigates the acoustic correlates of long and short vowel contrast for two dialects spoken in the northern part of Jordan. More specifically, it describes the vowels uttered in a connected speech by the Urban Speakers (referred to as 'Madani Dialect,' henceforth ‘MD’) and Rural Speakers (referred to as 'Fallaħ Dialect,' henceforth 'FD'). Three males and two females from each region uttered 40 words. The vowel inventory for both dialects consists of three short vowels, /i, a,u/, and five long vowels, /i: a: u: e: o:/. Phonetically speaking, vowels can be best analyzed by measuring their acoustic properties rather than describing their articulatory configurations (Ladefoged, 2003). As such, analyzing formant frequencies is the most common method to examine the characteristics of vowel systems of any language or variety. The F1, F2, and duration are the acoustic parameters that were measured, analyzed, and compared with previous studies when necessary. The results revealed that females have higher formants than males, duration is a cue for vowel identity, and length is phonemic. Also, the vowels of the Madani and Fallaћi dialects were found to have relatively shorter durations than their Arabic counterparts by Egyptian, Palestinian, Saudi, and Sudanese.

In this paper an outline is given of an investigation of language attitudes. In a matched guise experiment rural (Westfrisian) and urban (Amsterdam) subjects were confronted with rural and urban accented speech and had to give judgments on the factors 'competence/ambitiousness', 'personal integrity', 'social attractiveness' and 'toughness'. The purpose of the study was 1. to collect data comparable with similar research in other countries; 2. to explore the feasibility of a unifying approach to the two types of language differentiation: regional and social. In the tentative conclusions below, reference is made to the following treatments: (i) rural subjects give judgments of urban speakers; (ii) urban subjects give judgments of rural speakers; (iii) urban subjects give judgments of urban speakers; (iv) rural subjects give judgments of rural speakers. It appears that accented speakers are always stigmatized as less competent, but urban speakers more so than rural ones. For urban judges, personal integrity is associated with standard speech. For rural judges, this is not the case. Social attractiveness is associated with accented speech, but this effect is mitigated under treatment (iv) - in this case the origin of the speaker is more important than his speech variety. Toughness is associated with accented speech, but under treatment (ii) the effect is not great: rural speakers are considered less tough by urban judges, even when they use substandard language. Note that rural people do not consider themselves to be less tough (treatment iv). Language is an important means whereby groups of people differentiate themselves from other groups. The importance of this instrument will increase when other differentiators are not readily available, due, i.a., to the complexity and diffuseness of the social environment. The opposition between regional and social language differentiation is not a useful one. Both urban and regional dialects are social dialects. Both kinds of varieties carry the same value for their speakers: 'I belong to this group'. Both are determined by the same factors; the difference lies in the different weights of each factor: the ways in which the groups are formed.

This study examines the phonological adaptation of English loanwords in Hindko, focusing on how socio-economic factors, education, and media exposure influence their pronunciation. A mixed-methods approach was used, combining semi-structured interviews, surveys, and phonological analysis. The results show that phonological adaptations of loanwords vary with education and exposure to English. Highly educated participants retain more original English pronunciation, while those with lower education levels exhibit more adaptations. Urban speakers, with greater media exposure, preserve English phonology, while rural speakers make more modifications. Additionally, younger generations show less adaptation compared to older ones, indicating a shift in language practices. The study highlights the complex relationship between socio-economic factors and language change, emphasizing the need for better language education and standardized media pronunciations. It suggests further research into multilingualism and the impact of language contact in evolving linguistic landscapes.

Fecha de recepción:­ 26 ­de­ agosto­ de­ 2009.Fecha de aceptación: ­17 ­de ­junio­ de ­2010. En el presente trabajo se analiza la relación existente entre la percepción de /s/ y /t/ del español y una serie de parámetros acústicos (duración delsegmento, frecuencia de inicio de la fricación, intensidad media, frecuencia de máxima intensidad, intensidad máxima y centro de gravedad) endos variedades del español hablado en la provincia de Málaga, 1) una variedad rural caracterizada por la indistinción del par de fricativas propio del español estándar y 2) una variedad urbana convergente en la dirección del estándar nacional, en la que se introduce la distinción. Los datos obtenidos indican que la intensidad tiene un importante papel tanto en la discriminación habitual de uno u otro sonido entre hablantes urbanos, como en las estrategias que emplean los hablantes rurales con un patrón de realización habitual reductor cuando prefieren articular el sonido no mate.

The study investigates the socio-pragmatic variation in refusals among rural and urban communities speaking Saudi Arabic. A total of 60 male Saudi Arabic speakers participated in a DCT questionnaire, assessing their refusals to invitations and requests. The results showed that both rural and urban speakers primarily use indirect strategies to refuse, involving softening elements to mitigate the impact of the refusal. However, rural speakers tended to use more indirect strategies and show a higher level of concern in their refusals compared to urban speakers. The study also found that individuals in Saudi Arabia are sensitive to social status and relationship distance when engaging in refusal situations. Those of higher social status were less likely to use indirect and softening language. The rural community demonstrated a higher level of concern in their refusals by employing more elaborate responses and greater levels of mitigation compared to the urban community. Understanding these socio-cultural differences in refusal strategies can help prevent misunderstandings and enhance cross-cultural understanding in Saudi Arabian communities.

This study addresses bidialectism in the context of language education by empirically assessing how explicit knowledge about language influences bidialectal students’ linguistic performance and language attitudes. A language-learning programme based on Language Awareness was applied in the bidialectal community of Cyprus with the primary aim of improving oral performance in urban and rural speakers’ second variety, the standard. Improvement was defined as a reduction of Cypriot dialectal interference in students’ Standard Modern Greek speech. A second aim was to document and subsequently identify changes in students’ language attitudes towards their two linguistic varieties. Quantitative analyses of the results reveal that the Language Awareness programme produced a marked improvement in students’ oral production of the standard variety and in their language attitudes.

This paper explores language ideologies and attitudes among both urban and rural speakers of Sakha (Yakut) in the Far Eastern region of the Russian Federation. Like other non-Russian languages in the Soviet era, Sakha was subject to many repressive and often contradictory policies; while today there is a sizeable, growing population of speakers and the presence of top-down support for the language within the Sakha Republic’s government, many contemporary Sakha speakers still express uncertainty about the future of Sakha. Differing perceptions of linguistic value and vitality together with the sustenance or abandonment of connections with other local speakers all shape Sakha speakers’ beliefs about whether the language is flourishing or disappearing. By tracing the shifts in contemporary metalinguistic discourse that circulates as language ideologies, we can see that while there have been positive changes in Sakha language policy and practices, some ambiguities from the Soviet period still linger and continue to influence how speakers view the future of the language.

The article is devoted to the multidimensional characterization of the substandard vocabulary of the sublanguage of the coal mining industry. The functional-semiotic and structural heterogeneity of sublanguage slang has been established on the concrete material of the modern miner's sublanguage. The stratification categories of substandard vocabulary (professionalisms, interprofessionalisms, quasi-professionalisms, professional jargonisms), lexico-thematic groups, functions are described in detail. Special attention is paid to the characteristics of the ways and sources of the formation of special vocabulary of the lower case of the miners sublanguage slang, the main ways of forming the analyzed vocabulary are described in detail: the creation of a formally new unit and various semantic changes of words. It is concluded that the emergence and functioning of a developed system of substandard vocabulary in the miners' sublanguage is associated with the action of two main trends: the tendency to nominativeness, due to the need to overcome lacunarity and linguistic redundancy, as well as the tendency to portability, imagery and expressiveness. The thesis is put forward and supported by linguistic material that the special vocabulary of the sublanguage slang of the coal mining industry, considered in the socio-cultural aspect, represents the linguistic embodiment of the world of a special professional subculture, demonstrates the peculiarities of perception of objects of the outside world, ways of interacting with them, cultural stereotypes, values, motives and attitudes common to representatives of this profession.

Emphatic variation of the labio-velar /w/ in two Jordanian Arabic dialects

Previous studies of the temporal organization of speech in American English have found differences in speaking or articulation rate according to speaker dialect or location, but small sample sizes and incomplete geographic coverage have limited the generalizability of the findings. In this study, articulation rates in American English are calculated from the automatic speech-to-text transcripts of more than 29,000 hours of video from local government and civic organization channels on YouTube from the 48 contiguous US states, containing more than 230 million individual word timings. Two questions are considered: are there regional differences in articulation rate? And do urban speakers articulate faster than rural speakers? The study presents several methodological innovations: first, it identifies a genre of regional speech suitable for interregional comparisons (meetings of local governments or civic organizations). Second, it introduces a new method for the calculation of articulation rate using cue and word timestamps from caption files. Third, it leverages US Census data to correlate the articulation rate with population for a large number of localities. The study shows that, in line with previous studies, Southerners articulate slower, and Americans from the Upper Midwest more quickly. In addition, there is a small but positive correlation between population size and articulation rate. Articulation rates are mapped using a measure of local autocorrelation.