Speech Community Research Articles

Эволюция концепта «языковая личность» в процессе конструирования социальной реальности

The article presents the stages of transformation of the concept “linguistic personality” in correlation with the changes of social reality. The reasons for the appearance of the concept “communicative personality” in connection with the formation of the social reality of the information society are substantiated. Comparative analysis of these concepts, involving linguistic, socio-cultural and socio-psychological factors is presented. The “linguistic turn” in socio-humanitarian research contributed to a new content of linguistic personality as a discursive concept. The sociological approaches of M. Weber and P. Bourdieu are given as the theoretical grounds of the connection between the social status of a linguistic personality and its belonging to a certain speech community. The example of the sociolinguistic discourse proves the influence of the level of education, linguistic in particular, on the access of the linguistic/communicative/discursive personality to the social lift (professional career development). Thus, the linguistic personality as a subject of social reality construction creates and maintains social communication, contributes to the enlargement of knowledge, intergenerational connections and, ultimately, to the improvement of the quality of life.

Lexical Variation Used by Muslim Speech Community in Saren Jawa

Lexical Variation Used by Muslim Speech Community in Saren Jawa

Tuning Learners to Linguistic Diversity using the “Your Words” Activity

The “Your Words” activity invites students to explore how they vary the ways that they communicate in their various speech communities (Morgan, 2014; Rampton, 2020). Students may consider their speech communities in only general terms, such as “I am a speaker of English and Cantonese because I am a resident of Hong Kong.” Or “I am from Miami, so I speak English and Spanish at home. Or “I like to skateboard, and I share some jargon with my skate mates that I don’t use in other situations.” To help them reflect more deeply on communities for which they may not have names, the “Your Words” activity invites them to reflect on and share a word or phrase that they only use in specific social groups that form part of their lives. The discussion that follows encourages students to consider how they modify the way they communicate as they move through the different speech communities that are part of their daily lives. The activity is useful for raising awareness of speech communities before introducing discussions about language attitudes and beliefs that can help prepare pre-service teachers for working with students whose linguistic and cultural diversity is unfamiliar to them.

From Conversation Starters to Speech Habits: A Sociophonetic Exploration of Language Fillers

This sociophonetic study delved into the intriguing domain of language fillers, investigating their transformation from mere conversation starters to integral speech habits. Language fillers, often dismissed as mere vocal pauses, were examined through a comprehensive exploration of their sociolinguistic complexities. Employing a multidimensional approach, encompassing phonetic, phonological, and sociocultural perspectives, this research uncovered the multifaceted functions and evolving roles of language fillers in contemporary communication. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses, this study not only elucidated the linguistic mechanisms underlying the use of language fillers but also highlighted their sociocontextual variability across diverse speech communities. By shedding light on the intricate interplay between language fillers, sociophonetics, and sociolinguistic norms, this investigation contributed to a deeper understanding of how language fillers shape and reflect individual communication styles and broader linguistic practices.

Variación estilística de la /s/ implosiva en el habla radiofónica de Guayaquil y su percepción social

The paper analyzes the stylistic variation of implosive /s/ in Guayaquil Spanish. The aim is to verify the sociolinguistic status of /s/-weakening according to Labov’s three-level hierarchy: linguistic indicators, markers, and stereotypes. It is argued that the aspired allophone [h], by representing a clear pattern of stylistic variation, can be qualified as a marker, and since it receives metalinguistic commentary from the speakers, it is also a stereotype in the Guayaquil speech community. The analysis contains a quantitative study of /s/ variation on a corpus of radio speech (CHARG) and a qualitative confrontation of the results with responses gathered in a language attitudes survey.

The epistemic future in exported grammars: a comparison between two Italo-Romance speech communities

Abstract The analysis of differences and analogies that the (synthetic) epistemic future exhibits in two varieties of the Italo‑Romance dialect of Verbicaro contributes to uncover uncharted aspects of its morphosyntax and uses. The case study presented in this paper is based on different degrees of competence of the speakers of the indigenous variety of north-western Calabria as well as the corresponding exported variety spoken in São Paulo (Brazil). The grammar and use of the epistemic future is fully captured if the analysis of the data is pursued alongside an assessment of the acquisitional history of the speakers. Based on the sociolinguistic account of three different groups of speakers of the exported Verbicarese (monolingual Verbicarese L1, bilingual Verbicarese‑Portuguese, Verbicarese heritage speakers), I provide a structural interpretation of the development of the synthetic epistemic future in both the exported and the indigenous variety. More specifically, I show how glaring parallels can be established between the three relevant groups of speakers of the exported speech community and three distinct stages of evolution of the epistemic future in the indigenous variety. This study also serves as a documentation task for the epistemic future which is rapidly disappearing in Verbicarese.

Automatic segmentation of vocal tract articulators in real-time magnetic resonance imaging

Background and ObjectivesThe characterization of the vocal tract geometry during speech interests various research topics, including speech production modeling, motor control analysis, and speech therapy design. Real-time MRI is a reliable and non-invasive tool for this purpose. In most cases, it is necessary to know the contours of the individual articulators from the glottis to the lips. Several techniques have been proposed for segmenting vocal tract articulators, but most are limited to specific applications. Moreover, they often do not provide individualized contours for all soft-tissue articulators in a multi-speaker configuration. MethodsA Mask R-CNN network was trained to detect and segment the vocal tract articulator contours in two real-time MRI (RT-MRI) datasets with speech recordings of multiple speakers. Two post-processing algorithms were then proposed to convert the network's outputs into geometrical curves. Nine articulators were considered: the two lips, tongue, soft palate, pharynx, arytenoid cartilage, epiglottis, thyroid cartilage, and vocal folds. A leave-one-out cross-validation protocol was used to evaluate inter-speaker generalization. The evaluation metrics were the point-to-closest-point distance and the Jaccard index (for articulators annotated as closed contours). ResultsThe proposed method accurately segmented the vocal tract articulators, with an average root mean square point-to-closest-point distance of less than 2.2mm for all the articulators in the leave-one-out cross-validation setting. The minimum P2CPRMS was 0.91mm for the upper lip, and the maximum was 2.18mm for the tongue. The Jaccard indices for the thyroid cartilage and vocal folds were 0.60 and 0.61, respectively. Additionally, the method adapted to a new subject with only ten annotated samples. ConclusionsOur research introduced a method for individually segmenting nine non-rigid vocal tract articulators in real-time MRI movies. The software is openly available as an installable package to the speech community. It is designed to develop speech applications and clinical and non-clinical research in fields that require vocal tract geometry, such as speech, singing, and human beatboxing.

Non-Institutional and Grassroots Prescriptivism for Slovenian

The current SP 2001 with supplementary infrastructure (Fran portal, Jezikovna Svetovalnica) has the highest normative authority for the Slovenian speech community. Still, non-institutional usage guides have been appearing in Slovenia, addressing the issues of complicated rules and protracted searches. Since they do help speakers of Slovene resolve some usage problems, two forms of prescriptivism for Slovenian were surveyed: non-institutional prescriptivism and grassroots prescriptivism. Non-institutional prescriptivism is an anglophone invention appearing mostly in book form and is typically based on an author’s sense of style. Grassroots prescriptivism is a relatively novel phenomenon which consists of internet users interacting to solve one another’s usage problems without necessarily being language professionals. For Slovene, it was discovered that several books were published that resemble usage guides. Three have been researched and it was discovered that Pravipis by Aleksandra Kocmut most closely resembles a prototypical usage guide. Interestingly, the authors all cede normative authority to SP 2001, an institutional guide. Most of grassroots prescriptivism is carried out in specific Facebook groups in which their members rapidly respond to posted usage problems. Among other things, it was discovered that grassroots prescriptivism responds to usage problems more quickly while institutional guidace does so in a more reliable and informed manner.

Interference: Affixation of Mongondow Dialect in Indonesian Learning

The bilingual backgrounds of speakers, the lack of loyalty to the target language, the limited knowledge of the vocabulary of the target language, the need for synonyms, the taking into consideration of prestige and style, and the inadequate command of the target language are just a few of the things that contribute to language interference. One type of language interference that occurs is interference where a native speaker uses a pattern or rule that leads to an error or incorrect form in the target language. The use of two or more languages by a speech community causes deviations in morphology, syntax, phonology, and even semantics. This deviation will result in a linguistic phenomenon known as interference. This research aimed to determine whether the Mongondow dialect can interfere with students' learning of Indonesian. The researcher wanted to investigate the impact of students’ Mongondow dialect particularly when communicating in diverse cultural environments. The researcher described the difficulties students had in forming verbs with affixation in the Mongondow local dialect in their learning of the Indonesian language. The researcher also identified factors that indicate how the local dialect can interfere with students' language skills. A qualitative descriptive method was chosen for the study because it is suitable for collecting data on the students' perceptions through semi-structured interviews. The researcher interviewed Indonesian teachers and students to understand why they ask certain types of questions during the teaching and learning process. The analysis of students' interferences in Indonesian learning revealed that the use of the Mongondow dialect in communication had a positive impact on the oral performance of students. Moreover, it also increased their motivation to learn and helped teachers build their self-confidence. Additionally, utilizing various media and facilities proved to be beneficial in promoting active learning among students.

EXPLORING THE INFLUENCE OF CONVERGENT COMMUNITIES ON LEARNERS’ ATTITUDES TOWARD DIVERGENT TRAITS

The cultural context of speech communities represents people’s life experiences shaped by region, geography, ethnicity, language, and values; all these contribute to the construction of one’s identity. Our study explores the complex reciprocity between the socio-cultural environment and the learners’ identities. The cultural background of learners profoundly affects self-perception and identity construction. Simultaneously, identity construction has a reciprocal effect on interaction and involvement with cultural heritage. Hence, we investigate the impact of rural communities’ cultural repertoire on the personal and professional prospects of learners. To reach this end, third-year pupils from the High School of Sidi Housni, Tiaret, Algeria were selected using a non-probabilistic sampling. We collected data through a survey and an observation, employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The findings reveal that the cultural background influences learners’ perceptions of the world, besides their positive divergent attitudes towards gender roles. Furthermore, these valuable insights have important implications for cultivating a more inclusive and flexible learning setting. In a nutshell, divergent and convergent communities possess distinct qualities and resources that collectively foster a gradual transition toward embracing change.

Language Attitudes of the Madurese Community Toward Madurese, Indonesian, English, and Other Foreign Languages

Language attitudes play an important role in the use and maintenance of a language. This is particularly the case in a multilingual speech community such as the Madurese community where most people speak more than one language. The present study seeks to understand the attitudes of the Madurese community toward Madurese, Indonesian, English, and other foreign languages (MIEof languages). To achieve this, 200 questionnaires were randomly distributed to respondents in Bangkalan, Sampang, Pamekasan, and Sumenep, but only 150 questionnaires were filled in and returned. The questionnaires, which contained questions and answers using 5 point Likert scales of ‘strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree’, were analyzed quantitatively by averaging the calculation results of each of the scales. The results were categorized based on relevant themes, i.e., attitudes toward learning, mastery, and use of MIEof languages. Our analyses showed that most of the respondents demonstrated positive attitudes toward learning, mastery, and use of MIEof languages. The results are discussed with respect to the language maintenance of Madurese and local languages, the prospects of Indonesian, English, and other foreign languages along with multilingualism practices in Madura. It can be concluded that the Madurese community seem to be open to the practice of multilingualism, indicated by their positive attitudes toward language learning, mastery, and use. It is suggested that future studies make use of qualitative data, such as interview data so that findings about the language attitudes of the Madurese community under consideration can be further corroborated.

German and Romance varieties in contact in northeastern Italy

Northeastern Italy offers several sites where a variety of German is in contact with Italian, Italo-Romance, or Rhaeto-Romance: All of these contact situations vary according to sociolinguistic and extralinguistic factors, such as the composition of the speech community, structure of linguistic repertoires, language status, standardization, and demography. These factors combine into more or less coherent speech community types that, in turn, constrain the typology of contact linguistic phenomena that can be observed. In this contribution, based on the trilingual region of South Tyrol, a few emblematic case studies will be discussed focusing on insertional mechanisms that occur in speech. Based on the outcomes of a larger research project and drawing on various corpora of conversational data, quantitative and qualitative aspects of this contact situation will be explored in more detail.

Accommodation Patterns in the Speech of Arabic-Speaking Children and Adolescents: A Variationist Analysis

This paper presents a variationist analysis of patterns of speech accommodation by 40 Arabic-speaking children and adolescents (aged 3–17) experiencing dialect contact in a Bedouin speech community near Damascus, Syria. It examines participants’ use of the phonological variables (θ), (ð), and (q), and the morphophonological feminine suffix (-a) in recorded sociolinguistic interviews and play sessions with two female fieldworkers, a local and an urban speaker, in order to investigate accommodation patterns across different interlocutors. Accommodation patterns were influenced by age, gender, and the linguistic variable under examination. Convergence to the urban interviewer was most evident in the realization of (q), whereas little convergence, and indeed variation, occurred in the realization of (-a), and more convergence occurred in the speech of girls and speakers younger than 15. Divergence and maintenance emerged in the speech of 15–17-year-old male speakers. These patterns are analysed in light of Accommodation Communication Theory and issues of identity and linguistic prestige in Arabic. Accommodative behaviour in the speech of participants exhibits their awareness of the social value of the phonological variables under investigation and demonstrates a high level of sociolinguistic awareness and competence.

A Sociolinguistics analysis on Sukuma Hen names

The paper analyses Hen naming system among the Sukuma speech community of Tanzania. Most literature has concentrated on personal, cow, dog, and tree names but not Hen names despite their socio-cultural significance. paper that accounts for Sukuma Hen names and their associated meaning under the Cognitive Grammar Theory. The theory that refers to the meaning of a word (name) belongs to conceptualizations. The researcher used snowball sampling to get six participants and they were selected purposively including, three Hen keepers and three traditional healers from Njingani village of Geita rural district in Tanzania. Unstructured interviews and focus group discussions were the instruments for data collection. The study found eight Hen names in Sukuma speech community and the associated reasons for their names. These are Jomo, Sagala, and Holasi ''for appearance''; Shingamagaji, 'for beliefs'; Nzoma ‘for color’, kaMende, Mbuni, and Mhando ‘for body size’ From this base, the color, beliefs, and physical appearance determine Hen names in Sukuma speech community. It was concluded that Hen names in the Sukuma speech community are meaningful and they connotate function in accordance with conceptualizations ground. The paper recommended that there is a need to conduct a study on the names and the associated factors for Hens resulted from Hen breeding as the result of mixed color, behavior, size, and structure.

Świadomość językowa mieszkańców Górnego Śląska przesiedlonych z dawnych województw południowo-wschodnich Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej

The paper considers attitudes towards varieties of Polish on the example of people born in the former southeastern provinces of the Second Republic of Poland and forced to emigrate after the Second World War to Upper Silesia. These people are a language community that represents the dual identity of culture and language. Their first identity was formed on the Polish-Ukrainian borderland during the childhood and adolescence period. However, these people are part of the Upper Silesian speech community. They are strongly professionally and privately bound to the region.
 The paper is based on interviews with 33 people conducted at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. All of interviewers had secondary or higher education. The analysis refers to the opinions of respondents about the role of language in their own lives and in the activities of the displaced persons community. This work examines the social evaluation of variants and feelings that the language invokes, in particular, the Polish spoken in the former southeastern borderland compared to the Silesian dialect. It may be concluded that elements of the pre-war dialect of the city of Lviv constituted for these people an indicator of belonging to the community whereas the Silesian dialect was treated with reserve.

The “Balfour Gang” versus “the Saladin Gang”: Geographic metaphors and metonyms in Israel as securitized, polarizing constructs

Research has illustrated that metaphors and metonyms are concepts that govern thought and action, playing a central role in constructing realities. While previous studies have demonstrated that metaphors and metonyms are utilized as tools for conceptualizing nations, this study examines how metaphoric and metonymic representations of specific locations within the nation-state can serve as polarizing constructs within the nation-state. The State of Israel presents an interesting case study regarding how metaphors and metonyms construct polarizing identities, following increasingly polarized cross-cutting cleavages. Utilizing the Sketch Engine ELEXIS Hebrew Web corpora, this study utilizes discourse analysis tools to characterize the reproduction of metaphorical and metonymic meanings of geographical locations, tapping into specific cultural codes of the Israeli speech community.

A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF SEMANTIC CHANGE IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC

Semantic change refers to the way in which the meaning of a word changes over long or short stretches of time. It can be internally or externally motivated .The equivalent to the paradigm in morphology is ,in semantics , the word field in which words and their meanings stand in a network of relationships .The alteration of meaning occurs because words are constantly used and what is intended by speakers is not exactly the same each time .If a different intention for a word is shared by the speech community and becomes established in usage then a semantic change has occurred. This study is divided into three sections , the first is devoted to semantic change in English ,while the second is going to discuss it in Arabic ; however ,the third section will shed light on some samples chosen from the two languages to show how semantic change practically takes place across their history .The aim of this research is to state the stages of those two languages` development ,types of semantic change ,reasons and processes of word formation in each language . The following conclusions are shown: 1. Semantic change is , just like other types of linguistic change , continuous, not sudden but gradual and universal . 2. Gaps in the historical record between the identifiable stages called for the loss of the middle stage of Arabic , on the one hand , and produced the illusion of discontinuity between Anglo-Saxon and Middle English and between Middle English and Modern English , on the other hand . 3. Causes of semantic change are either linguistic or extra –linguistic . 4. As far as these two languages are concerned , they have passed different stages and were subject to different political and social factors , yet they have almost the same types .

Speaker Profiling Based on the Short-Term Acoustic Features of Vowels

Speech samples can provide valuable information regarding speaker characteristics, including their social backgrounds. Accent variations with speaker backgrounds reflect corresponding acoustic features of speech, and these acoustic variations can be analyzed to assist in tracking down criminals from speech samples available as forensic evidence. Speech accent identification has recently received significant consideration in the speech forensics research community. However, most works have utilized long-term temporal modelling of acoustic features for accent classification and disregarded the stationary acoustic characteristics of particular phoneme articulations. This paper analyzes short-term acoustic features extracted from a central time window of English vowel speech segments for accent discrimination. Various feature computation techniques have been compared for the accent classification task. It has been found that using spectral features as an input gives better performance than using cepstral features, with the lower filters contributing more significantly to the classification task. Moreover, detailed analysis has been presented for time window durations and frequency bin resolution to compute short-term spectral features concerning accent discrimination. Using longer time durations generally requires higher frequency resolution to optimize classification performance. These results are significant, as they show the benefits of using spectral features for speaker profiling despite the popularity of cepstral features for other speech-related tasks.

The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Evidence from MENA Americans in the Upper Midwest and southern California

Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) Americans are an understudied speech community in sociolinguistics. In terms of racial classification and identification, MENA Americans have been legally and historically classified as white but are not socially perceived as white (Beydoun, 2013, 2015). While early immigrants from MENA regions to the US were mostly Christians, ever since 1947, the majority of immigrants from MENA regions to the US have been from Muslim backgrounds (Orfalea, 2006); this demographic change can result in more ethnic visibility for MENA Americans in the US (cf., e.g., Shryock & Lin, 2009, for a discussion of ethnic visibility of MENA Americans in southeastern Michigan). Higher ethnic visibility can in turn lead to certain linguistic performances on the part of MENA Americans. Several studies have looked at the interaction of ethnic identity/visibility and local vowel patterns such as the merging of the low back vowels (the vowels in THOUGHT and LOT1). For example, Hall–Lew (2009) showed that Asian Americans in San Francisco took part in the low back vowel merger and high back vowel fronting, which both index local meanings being part of the California Vowel Shift (Eckert, 2008). Going beyond one particular locality, Wong and Hall–Lew (2014) demonstrated clear influence of local dialect on the speech of Asian Americans in two different localities, with Asian Americans from NYC having distinct low back vowels and those from San Francisco merged low back vowels. Comparing the speech of three different ethnic groups in the multicultural context of Toronto, Hoffman and Walker (2010) explored two features of the Canadian Vowel Shift: the retraction of TRAP and the lowering and retraction of DRESS. Their findings showed that while Chinese Canadians disfavored these two patterns, British/Irish and Italian Canadians favored them. In another study in the context of California English, Cardoso et al. (2016) looked at subclasses of the TRAP vowel in the speech of Chinese Americans and white Americans of San Francisco. They found that the nasal split of TRAP (it being raised when followed by a nasal consonant, and being retracted and lowered when followed by an oral consonant) was more advanced for white speakers than the Chinese group. Cardoso et al. (2016) associated the observed difference to the social meaning of the TRAP nasal split in California indexing white or non-Chicanx social personae.

Tracking the acceptance of neologisms in German: Psycholinguistic factors and their correspondence with corpus-linguistic findings

Neologisms, i.e., new words or meanings, are finding their way into everyday language use all the time. In the process, already existing elements of a language are recombined or linguistic material from other languages is borrowed. But are borrowed neologisms accepted similarly well by the speech community as neologisms that were formed from “native” material? We investigate this question based on neologisms in German. Building on the corresponding results of a corpus study, we test the hypothesis of whether “native” neologisms are more readily accepted than those borrowed from English. To do so, we use a psycholinguistic experimental paradigm that allows us to estimate the degree of uncertainty of the participants based on the mouse trajectories of their responses. Unexpectedly, our results suggest that the neologisms borrowed from English are accepted more frequently, more quickly, and more easily than the “native” ones. These effects, however, are restricted to people born after 1980, the so-called millenials. We propose potential explanations for this mismatch between corpus results and experimental data and argue, among other things, for a reinterpretation of previous corpus studies.