Dialect Research Articles

Exposure to dialect variation in an artificial language prior to literacy training impairs reading of words with competing variants but does not affect decoding skills.

Many bidialectal children grow up speaking a variety (e.g., a regional dialect) that differs from the variety in which they subsequently acquire literacy. Previous computational simulations and artificial literacy learning experiments with adults have demonstrated lower accuracy in reading contrastive words for which dialect variants exist compared with noncontrastive words without dialect variants. At the same time, exposure to multiple varieties did not affect learners' ability to phonologically decode untrained words; in fact, longer literacy training resulted in a benefit from dialect exposure as competing variants in the input may have increased reliance on grapheme-phoneme conversion. However, these previous experiments interleaved word learning and reading/spelling training, yet children typically acquire substantial oral language knowledge prior to literacy training. Here we used artificial literacy learning with adults to examine whether the previous findings replicate in an ecologically more valid procedure where word learning precedes literacy training. We also manipulated training conditions to explore interventions thought to be beneficial for literacy acquisition, such as providing explicit social cues for variety use and literacy training in both varieties. Our findings replicated the reduced accuracy for reading contrastive words in those learners who had successfully acquired the dialect variants prior to literacy training. This effect was exacerbated when literacy training also included dialect variation. Crucially, although no benefits from the interventions were found, dialect exposure did not affect reading and spelling of untrained words suggesting that phonological decoding skills can remain unaffected by the existence of multiple word form variants in a learner's lexicon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Is Your Accent Right for the Job? A Meta-Analysis on Accent Bias in Hiring Decisions.

Standard-accented job candidates are perceived as more hireable than non-standard-accented candidates. Two broad perspectives have emerged as to what drives this effect: (a) that it is a pragmatic response to the perception that non-standard accents can impede job-relevant communication (processing fluency explanation) and/or (b) that non-standard accents signal "otherness" and candidates are devalued as a result (prejudice explanation). This meta-analytic integration of 139 effect sizes (N = 4,576) examined these two perspectives. Standard-accented candidates were considered more hireable than non-standard-accented candidates (d = 0.47)-a bias that was stronger for high communication jobs. Other findings, however, are difficult to explain from a processing fluency explanation: candidates' relative comprehensibility was not a significant moderator of hiring bias. Moreover, the degree of accent bias was associated with perceptions of the candidates' social status, and accent bias was particularly pronounced among female candidates and for candidates who spoke in foreign (as compared with regional) accents.

An “evasive neuter”? A study on neuter singular indefinite pronouns with human reference in seventeenth–nineteenth century literary German

In the area of agreement with noun phrases displaying reference problems, “evasive forms” may be used to avoid problematic choices. When referring to people of more than one or unknown social gender, masculine or feminine forms might be inappropriate. An “evasive construction” solves this problem by turning to a form that is neither masculine nor feminine. A well-known example is “singular they” in English (e.g. anyone can do it if they try hard enough). In literary New High German, neuter singular forms of indefinite pronouns could be used in similar contexts. This construction is largely obsolete in present-day Standard German but well attested until the nineteenth century and still current in some modern regional dialects. In this paper, the grammatical properties of this construction are discussed. It is shown that neuter gender is used for a specific semantic value, namely, to indicate more than one social gender simultaneously or to leave social gender explicitly open.

Maidin Cornwall

AbstractWhile the research literature on regional dialect levelling is substantial (e.g.Williams and Kerswill 1999;Britain 2002;Watt 2002;Jansen 2019), this process is under-explored and under-theorised when it comes to patterns of lexical usage. Usingmaidas a case-study, in this article I provide a detailed account of processes of lexical levelling in Cornwall. I consider the usage ofmaidfrom two perspectives, that of onomasiology and semasiology. From an onomasiological perspective,maid, as a variant of the conceptwoman, exhibits socio-stylistic reallocation, with attested usages ofmaidin this study being limited to older speakers in careful speech styles. From a semasiological perspective, two senses ofmaid, ‘woman’ and ‘female servant or attendant’, have undergone structural reallocation in apparent-time withmaid‘woman’ being the prototypical sense for older speakers but a more peripheral sense for their younger counterparts.

Сближаване и раздалечаване на балканските народи и техните езици

The article examines the interaction of the Balkan peoples in the composition of multinational empires. Widespread multilingualism and frequent switching from one language to another eventually led to the formation of the Balkan Linguistic Union. With the rise of national consciousness in the 19th century and the change of political configuration, the process of convergence of the Balkan languages was interrupted. Moreover, individual regional dialects of some languages, once united by a common name, took on a life of their own. But there is also a reverse process, languages artificially separated for political reasons are regaining their former integrity.

Melting pot or salad bowl: Cultural effects on industrial similarity during trade liberalization

This paper examines the impact of culture on the industrial similarity between two adjacent counties during the process of trade liberalization between 1998 and 2007. The findings show that trade accelerates the industrial similarities between counties. The evolution of similarity is unequal between regions and over time, as industries in neighboring counties that belong to different dialect regions become more similar than industries within the same dialect region. The rise in industrial similarity is being fueled by the emergence of high-skill-intensive businesses as a result of trade-related technology spillovers. Adjacent counties of different dialects have greater skill endowments, which facilitate information transfer.

Subtitling Neapolitan Dialect in “My Brilliant Friend”: Linguistic Choices and Sociocultural Implications in the Screen Adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Best-selling Novel

In the screen adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s best-selling novel “My Brilliant Friend”, the first foreign language co-production of the American pay-cable network HBO with the Italian public broadcaster RAI, as a specific requirement of the American producers, the Italian of the main characters has been transformed into Neapolitan, a thick regional dialect mostly appropriate to tell the story of a life-long friendship on the backdrop of the 1950s poor outskirts of Naples, the main city of southern Italy. Starting from some background theories of cultural aspects of translation together with audiovisual translation, the aim of this presentation is that of analysing how English subtitlers have faced the translation of the dialectal elements in such a culture-bound audiovisual text and to what extent their choices depend on those made by Italian subtitlers, then discussing about the sociocultural implications of the solutions adopted. The data have been organized and presented with reference to the extralinguistic and the intralinguistic levels (in terms of syntactical, lexico-semantic and crosscultural pragmatic elements).

Listening to Others: Dubbing Global Media in Québec

Context: In intellectual work and cultural policy documents related to the francophone media market, the struggle between the old mechanisms, bound to the physical infrastructure of the land, and the new virtual ones is recast as a competition between nation and globalism, between québécois—a local accent seen as a marker of national character and self-recognition—and the linguistic construct of français international—spoken only on the dubbing stage. Analysis: This article examines how dubbing practices become acts of cultural diplomacy in the clash between legacy and platform distribution. Conclusions and Implications: Ambivalent towards traditional displays of national selfhood, the Québec dubbing industry insists that its cultural identity is more accurately represented through participation in the global market rather than through regional accents.

“Sounds like home”: The effect of listener on matching guise in regional accent on syntactic acceptability

This study unites sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by matching or mismatching social expectations of participants during a syntactic grammaticality judgement task. I hypothesize that regional syntactic structures are more acceptable when heard in their corresponding local, regional accent compared to a nonlocal accent. The experiment focuses on Southern American English as spoken in western Kentucky as the local accent and personal datives and double modals as matching, regional grammatical structures, along with a set of nonlocal filler sentences. 81 University of Kentucky participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey. Regional structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. Self-identified Kentuckian Participants rated local structures higher than non-Kentuckian participants, regardless of which accent they heard. This is prominent in ratings of the nonlocal audio; Kentuckian participants rated both local structures in the nonlocal accent approximately fifteen points higher than non-Kentuckians. In contrast, non-Kentuckian participants mark filler sentences in the local audio lower than the nonlocal, a variation absent from Kentuckian participants’ ratings. These results suggest that grammaticality judgements result from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with the phonological and syntactic structure of an utterance. Judgement of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation.

Modeling retroflex fricative variation in accented mandarin

Since dental-retroflex fricative contrast is not consistently maintained in many southern dialects of Chinese, native speakers of these dialects may not accurately produce the Mandarin retroflex fricative /ʂ/. Consequently, /ʂa/ may be realized as [sa] (Duanmu, 2007). This study investigated the variation of the retroflex fricative /ʂ/ in a Chinese Mandarin speech corpus (DataTang, 2018). The corpus contains 200 hours of recordings of 600 speakers from different dialectal regions in China. Each recording was aligned at the phone level using Montreal Forced Aligner. The center of gravity of the acoustic energy (COG) of the target sounds was extracted using Christian DiCanio’s Praat script. For statistical analysis, the generalized additive mixed-effects model (GAMM) was used. COG was the response variable. The following vowel’s height, tone, and gender were factorial predictors. To evaluate the geographic effect, we used tensor product smooths by fricatives with the longitude and latitude of each speaker’s birthplace (Chuang et al., 2021). Our results suggested a more dental-like realization of the retroflex for speakers from southern China and significant effects of the following vowel’s height and gender in the realization of Mandarin retroflex fricative.

Utah Dialect Regions and Features

Data from the Utah Dialect Survey were used to delineate dialect boundaries in the state of Utah. Statistical algorithms divided the state into rural and urban dialect zones. Twelve features were identified that distinguish the two dialects. Three additional features were extracted from the the Harvard Survey of North American Dialects. The idea that the rural vs. urban divide is related to a greater number of immigrants to urban areas is discounted. Many rural features coincide with those used more by older Utahns suggesting that rural areas maintain more conservative Utah characteristics.

The influence of candidates’ physical attributes on patient ratings in simulated assessments of clinical practice

Background We have previously shown that clinical examiners’ scoring is not negatively impacted when a candidate has a tattoo, unnatural hair colour, or a regional accent. We investigated whether these physical attributes in exam candidates impact patient scoring. Methods Simulated/real patients were randomly assigned to watch five videos of simulated candidate performances of a cranial nerve examination: clear fail, borderline, good, ‘clear pass’ without an attribute, and ‘clear pass’ with one of the attributes (tattoo, purple hair, accent). Participants scored domains of communication and professionalism. We compared scores for the clear pass candidates with and without attributes. Results One hundred and eighty three patients participated. The total scores for the candidates with tattoos and purple hair were higher than the candidate with no physical attribute (p < 0.001). For the candidate with a Liverpool English accent no difference was identified (p = 0.120). Conclusions The presence of certain physical attributes (tattoos or purple hair) was associated with higher scores given by patients to candidates in a simulated physical examination station.

Spot It and Learn It! Word Learning in Virtual Peer‐Group Interactions Using a Novel Paradigm for School‐Aged Children

AbstractWe use a novel paradigm to examine the effect of language exposure and variable input on the acquisition of words in primary school–aged children. Children growing up with different languages and foreign or regional accents in their input might benefit from their experience with variability when learning new words from peers with unfamiliar accents. We ask to what extent language and accent experience helps monolingual and bilingual children learn new words in the context of accent variability. Children (aged 7–11 years) played a computerized card game with virtual peers that resembles natural advanced lexical acquisition, during which new words are learned from child speakers and are produced actively in peer‐group interactions. Successful word learning was predicted by the amount of input in regional and foreign accents but not by exposure to other languages (i.e., bilingualism). We discuss how accent experience affects word learning under variable input conditions.

Nesting jackdaws’ responses to human voices vary with local disturbance levels and the gender of the speaker

The ability to detect and respond to indicators of risk is vital for any animal and, for many species, humans represent a key threat. We investigated whether wild jackdaws, Corvus monedula , a species that thrives in anthropogenic environments but is regularly persecuted by people, associate human voices with differential degrees of risk and differ in their responses according to local levels of human disturbance. Playbacks showed that nesting females did not discriminate between the voices of familiar men who posed differing levels of threat, generalize to unfamiliar individuals with similar regional accents or discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar accents and voices. They were, however, considerably more wary towards male than female human voices, which may reflect the greater likelihood of negative experiences with men than women. Responses to playbacks also differed across fine-scale spatial locations: females nesting in areas of the colony with high levels of disturbance were less likely to leave the nest cup in response to playbacks and were more wary on their return to the nest than birds nesting in less disturbed areas. Nevertheless, levels of local disturbance did not influence reproductive success. Together these results indicate that, although vocal cues alone may not suffice for wild jackdaws to discriminate between individual humans or generalize across categories of people, sensitivity to cues of gender and local disturbance may help jackdaws to optimize their defensive behaviour and maintain breeding success. Further research into plastic responses towards indicators of human risk is vital to understand and mitigate the impacts of increasing urbanization on wildlife populations. • Nesting jackdaws were more fearful of playbacks of men's than women's voices. • No discrimination based on voices' accent, familiarity or threat level was found. • Birds used to high disturbance were less likely to inspect or flee voices. • Birds were warier when returning to nests in areas with high levels of disturbance.

Aicha Is More Dutch but Less Dynamic than Ahmed: The Gendered Nature of Race in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT In this article we rely on accent evaluation to test the ‘intersectional invisibility hypothesis’ 1 that social cognition about men (but not women) is overrepresented in group-level beliefs. 2 As a case in point, we investigate the evaluation of male and female Moroccan accents to gain insight into impression formation of Muslims in the Netherlands, and to find out whether stereotypical qualities associated with Moroccan-Dutch people, such as aggressive, macho, and criminal, are in fact associated with Moroccan-Dutch men. Two matched-guise experiments featuring regional and ethnic accents of Dutch (one with male speakers, one with female speakers) confirm the intersectional invisibility hypothesis, but the inclusion of traditional and modern prestige measures in accent evaluation research results in arguably richer stereotype and prejudice accounts, and in this sense, the present investigation adds nuance and shade to Gloria Wekker’s (2016) pessimistic account of racism in Dutch society. Male Moroccan-Dutch speech is strongly deprecated and is always deemed inferior to indigenous speech; at the same time it is also found to be the most dynamically prestigious of all accents. Female Moroccan-Dutch speech does not engender extreme reactions, but it is not regarded as dynamic either and a long way from being accepted as indigenous speech.

"Anganam" in Semantic Perspective

Tamil is a dual-dialect language, written and spoken. It can be seen that the variety of a word differs depending on race and region. Linguists call this dialectical research. Although the meaning of the language spoken in one place is the same in another place, we see that the words and phonetics differ. A dialect is classified as a regional dialect depending on the place where it is spoken and as a social dialect based on the social status of the people who speak it. The purpose of this article is to investigate the word and meaning of the word “Anganam'' from semantic point of view. Semantics and lexicology are branches of linguistics.

Babel and Gender: The Relationship between Identity, Clusters and Status

This study explores the role of identity attributes that influence an individual’s association with language-based clusters within multinational enterprises (MNEs). Current research on language in international business has shown that language is a core element of one’s social identity and employees in MNEs can form homophily-based clusters with those who share their native language, and such clusters can significantly influence communication and knowledge sharing within MNEs. However, research assumes that clusters are static and does not take into consideration the role of attributes other than language that could influence individual association with these clusters and the resultant dynamics. We conducted a qualitative comparative case study of two MNE headquarters in India and found evidence of language-based meta- clusters in both organizations and discerned that employees’ linguistic identities often intersect with identities related to gender, regional dialects and education. Our data revealed cleavages in language-based meta-cultures based on dialect-based status differences as well as disassociation from clusters by female employees which seems to be driven by gender-based stereotypes and associated in- and out-group biases. Based on these findings, we develop a process model to explain the dynamic processes by which these identity attributes change the composition of language-based clusters over time. These changes have important consequences for communications and group dynamics within organizations, particularly as they relate to power, status and affect. Keywords: Gender; language; language-based clusters; regional dialects; social identity; status; stereotypes.

Review: The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity, by Jean-Luc Fournet

Review: <i>The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity</i>, by Jean-Luc Fournet

Review Essay: The Sicilian World of Gaetano Cipolla

Review Essay: The Sicilian World of Gaetano Cipolla

Social Discrimination in the Novel ‘Thol’by D. Selvaraj

The novel is a new genre of literature introduced in the twentieth century in Tamil. The first book in Tamil was written by Samuel Vedanayagam Pillai. Then, new writers emerged and contributed their writing in different genres. In this way, progressive author D. Selvaraj focused on the condition of tanners in the Dindigul regions in his novel "Thol" He explains the tannery workers' struggles, how they affected their families, and how they eventually succeeded in gaining their rights. These are described using the regional dialect. There are 117 characters in this novel, which has 26 chapters. Although many scholars claim that all people are equal, this has never been put into practice. It is this system of social discrimination that gives rise to the idea that all human beings are of the same race, intertwined in occupational caste differences, and inspires the attitude of one man to regard another as inferior. Anthropologists have opined that it was in India that caste systems emerged as industrial divisions and changed their shape. Based on these, this article aims to investigate the social discrimination shown in leather goods.