Standard Dialect Research Articles

A Doctor’s Foreign Accent Affects Perceptions of Competence

ABSTRACTMany doctors work or train in foreign countries and speak with a foreign accent. People sometimes assume that a person who speaks with a foreign accent possesses negative traits and personality characteristics. The purpose of this study is to test if doctors who speak with a foreign accent are perceived as less competent than doctors who speak with a standard accent. Both Caucasian Canadian and Chinese Canadian undergraduates rated the competence of a doctor speaking English with either a standard Canadian accent or a Chinese accent. The doctor was delivering either good or bad news about the patient’s cholesterol levels or cancer. Previous research has shown that when reminded of death, participants favor in-group members. We found that the Chinese-accented doctor’s competence was judged more negatively than the standard Canadian accented doctor by all participants. Both doctors were deemed less competent when delivering bad news than good news. These results suggest that foreign-accented doctors face biases about their competence from their patients.

The Effect of Different Degrees of Regional Accentedness in Radio Commercials: An Experiment with German Consumers

The present study investigated the use of a regional accent with varying strengths in product and service commercials. In a 2 (type of commercial: product/service) × 3 (accent: strong German regional / moderate German regional / standard German) between-subject design, 218 German native speakers evaluated product and service commercials. Findings suggest that the effects of regional accents were limited. In the product commercial, the speaker with a moderate accent was attributed more warmth than a speaker with a standard accent. In the service commercial, the attitude towards the service was more negative for the moderate than for the standard accent.

Deep neural network-based phoneme classification of standard Khasi dialect in continuous speech

In this paper, deep neural network (DNN) is used to classify phonemes of the standard Khasi dialect which is one of the commonly used dialects in the state of Meghalaya. For this, clean speech data were recorded in the laboratory from native speakers. In the proposed system, a monophone and a triphone hidden Markov models (HMMs) were also built to compare the results obtained. Our finding showed that DNN outperformed the classification over the other two models with a classification accuracy of 89.70%.

Understanding fairy tales spoken in dialect: an fMRI study

ABSTRACTDialect comprehension has rarely been studied on the text level. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the neuronal processing of auditory story comprehension was compared in 17 bilectal listeners who spoke Standard German and High Alemannic dialect, and in 19 monolectal listeners who did not speak dialect but only Standard German. 24 fairy tales were translated and recorded by speakers of both varieties. A text-related Extended Language Network (ELN) was more active for intelligible conditions compared to an unintelligible baseline. When High Alemannic fairy tales were presented, bilectal listeners activated the left aTL significantly more than monolectals. This activation was stronger for listeners who rated the dialect more pleasant. It increased over the duration of the stories, but more so for the familiar varieties. These results confirm the importance of the left aTL for text comprehension and add to our understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of dialect comprehension.

Daily dialect-speaking and wages among native Dutch speakers

Our paper studies the effects of daily dialect-speaking on hourly wages of native Dutch workers. The unconditional difference in median hourly wage between Standard Dutch speakers and dialect speakers is about 10% for males and 8% for females. Taking into account differences in personal characteristics, family characteristics and geographical differences, wage differences are reduced with about 6%-points.

The Current Use of Standard Dialects in Speech Practice and Pedagogy: A Mixed Method Study Examining the VASTA Community in the United States

ABSTRACT This study explores standard dialects in collegiate actor-training and professional coaching environments. While extensive theoretical literature exists on standard dialects in theatre training, few formal research studies exist. In this mixed methods study, quantitative and qualitative data were collected through (1) expert interview with linguists, professional actors, and voice professionals; (2) surveys from United States voice teachers and coaches (VASTA members); and (3) post-survey expert interviews. This examined perceived standard dialects, pedagogy, and professional coaching applications. The three key results were: (1) there is little dialect uniformity in the field; (2) current classical productions mostly utilize General American; and (3) there is a significant correlation between a participant’s graduate degree and the standard dialect(s) they teach. The theme of inclusivity arose in the follow-up expert interviews. While this topic requires further research, it has pedagogical implications for speech training for actors including self-reflexivity and the use of standard dialect alternatives.

Memory advantage for produced words and familiar native accents

ABSTRACTOur memory is better for words that we have read aloud than for words that we have read silently or have listened to. The present study tested this memory advantage for words with native accent markers that participants were either highly familiar or less familiar. As in previous studies, produced words were subsequently remembered better than listened-to words. In contrast to previous studies that involved a comparison of global foreign accents with standard native accents, in the present study words with highly familiar accent markers were remembered better than words with less familiar accent markers (Experiment 1). The familiar accent advantage was also found when participants could not hear their own productions during the training phase (Experiment 2). When tested with a week delay, produced words were still remembered better than listened-to words, but the advantage for words with familiar accent markers was no longer found (Experiment 3).

Training-induced pattern-specific phonetic adjustments by first and second language listeners

The current study investigated the phonetic adjustment mechanisms that underlie perceptual adaptation in first and second language (Dutch-English) listeners by exposing them to a novel English accent containing controlled deviations from the standard accent (e.g. /i/-to-/ɪ/ yielding /krɪm/ instead of /krim/ for ‘cream’). These deviations involved contrasts that either were contrastive or were not contrastive in Dutch. Following accent exposure with disambiguating feedback, listeners completed lexical decision and word identification tasks. Both native and second language listeners demonstrated adaptation, evidenced by higher lexical endorsement rates and word identification accuracy than untrained control listeners for items containing trained accent patterns. However, for L2 listeners, adaptation was modulated by the phonemic contrast, that is, whether or not it was contrastive in the listeners’ native language. Specifically, the training-induced criterion loosening for the L2 listeners was limited to contrasts that exist in both their L1, Dutch, and L2, English. For contrasts that are either absent or neutralized in Dutch, the L2 listeners demonstrated relatively loose pre-training criteria compared to L1 listeners. The results indicate that accent exposure induces both a general increase in tolerance for atypical speech input as well as targeted adjustments to specific categories for both L1 and L2 listeners.

Accent Identification in RP, CE, and GA By Native and Non-Native English Speakers

This study was conducted in order to determine various groups’ accuracy in identifying three major standard English accents. The main purpose of the experiment that was performed was to determine how well speakers familiar with these accents could tell them apart from other accents. It focused on comparing the test subjects’ recognition of Canadian English pronunciation with General American pronunciations. Received Pronunciation was used as a control as it is generally considered to differ much more from the standard North American varieties than they differ from one another.Within North America, the 'standard' accents of Canada and the US are quite similar. So similar, that one of the experiment’s hypotheses is that that despite being identified by linguists as different, many native speakers of the two dialects would have difficulty telling the difference themselves. The differences in the features of Canadian English (CE) and General American (GA) have been identified and studied by linguists before, but what this experiment sought to determine was the degree to which speakers of these dialects could tell them apart purely through listening.Canada is given some degree of stigma from the United States for its dialect, and has had fun poked at it for such Canadianisms as the use of 'eh?' and Canadian Raising- Americans will exaggerate the difference when illustrating it, saying “aboot” [ə'but] for about [əˈbʌʊt]. But how well can they perceive the difference when not already informed about the speaker's origins?An online survey was prepared, with audio clips or words in isolation and sentences, spoken by speakers of GA, CE, and RP, specifically using words that exhibited features that vary between the accents. This allowed us to examine subjects’ degree of recognition with, and without prosody, and to analyze the degree to which prosody affects accent recognition. In order to better determine how prior exposure influences accent recognition, the subjects were broken down into three groups: Native speakers of Canadian English, native speakers of American English and ESL speakers who had had prior exposure to Canadian English.One of the main findings of this experiment is that more than 80% of American respondents recognized their own national standard accent, and around 67% recognized the Canadian accent; while only 62% of the Canadian respondents recognized the Canadian accent accurately. Compared to Canadians, Americans were better at telling the North American varieties of spoken English apart.

ELT course books and Global English: the case of Greek lower secondary state schools

This article investigates whether aspects of Global English (GE) are echoed in textbooks used in the English classes of Greek lower secondary state schools. Given that English is no longer another foreign language but the world lingua franca, we argue that ELT students should be prepared to cope with the international, diversified linguacultural demands. Since listening is associated with intelligibility and comprehensibility, issues of utmost importance for effective communication of the messages conveyed, we conducted an analysis of the listening components of two main textbook series, Think Teen . Findings indicate that despite the variety of topics and their relevance to the learners’ needs and interests as observed in the audios, there is a limited amount of authenticity and genuineness. What’s more, there was an over-reliance on British English (BrE) Standard accent and a lack of well- structured tasks rendering learners unable to reflect upon the realistic use of English, permeating thus British- bound stereotypes and attitudes among them. Finally, we recommend that ELT listening materials be adequately modified so that the global reality is represented. A recommendation of a potential adaptation of a specific listening section included in one of the two textbooks is provided.

Test Phobia of IELTS and its Remedy

English acquisition as a second language (ESL) has been a Herculean task for students generally. When it comes specifically to IELTS, it seems to be the most difficult assessment of life because students’ level of English do not meet the IELTS requirements due to incorrect local practices; either due to unconducive environment or social factors for which the best way out is rephrasing the text, getting used to standard English, majoring appropriate use of tense, lack of familiarity with standard accents. Hence, presentation of opinions and variety of vocabulary with it aspects of synonyms and antonyms produce a better result in scoring respectable bands in IELTS.

Ḥalabi Arabic as a Contact Dialect in Jerusalem

This essay presents the main characteristics of a variety of Jerusalem Arabic, which was spoken in Jerusalem in the first half of the 20th century by Jews of North-Syrian origin, and also by others who conformed to this way of speech. The description provided is based on new evidence collected in 2012–2013 through interviews with elderly Jews who grew up in Jerusalem in the 1930s and 1940s. Growing up in mandatory Jerusalem, they mixed and socialized freely with their Christian and Muslim neighbors. Many of them heard the Arabic dialect of Aleppo at home, yet their home-dialect went through processes of linguistic accommodation, resulting in a contact variety which evidently differs from standard Jerusalem Arabic. Throughout this article I discuss a series of distinctive phonological, morphological, and lexical features, and discuss them vis-à-vis the standard dialect of Jerusalem and also in comparison with Aleppo Arabic. While many differences follow from the retention of substrate features in the language of the immigrants, this Jewish variety is by no means identical to any Syrian dialect. Rather, it is a contact dialect which emerged after the immigration to Jerusalem and which differs from Syrian Arabic in several prominent aspects. The linguistic analysis of the materials demonstrates the spread of features of the local dialect at the expense of others, as well as the emergence of fudged linguistic forms, which are identical neither to those of the local standard nor to those of the input dialect.The last section of this essay offers two full-length texts, demonstrating the Ḥalabi variety of Jerusalem Arabic (hereafter:ḥja) in its natural context.

Reconstructing sociolinguistic variation

In this paper we illustrate a methodology for reconstructing language ininteraction from literary texts, demonstrating how they can serve as documentation ofspeech when primary linguistic material is unavailable. A careful incorporation offacts from literary dialect not only informs grammatical reconstruction in situationswith little to no documentation, but also allows for the reconstruction of thesociolinguistic use of a language, an oft-overlooked aspect of linguisticreconstruction. Literary dialogue is often one of the only attestations of regionalvarieties of a language with a very salient standard dialect, where no primary sourcesare available. Odessan Russian (OdR), a moribund dialect of Russian, serves as a casestudy. OdR grew out of intensive language contact and differs from most othervarieties of Russian, with substrate influences from Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Polish,and lexical borrowing from other languages. The only records of "spoken" OdR arefound in fictional narrative. An analysis of works from several prominent Odessanwriters, including Isaak Babel and Ze'ev Jabotinsky, reveals considerable variationamong speakers of OdR; careful tracking of this variation shows how it wasdistributed among different social groups, and suggests how it may have beendeployed to index and acknowledge different social roles.

Morphological Description of Noun Formation Process: Case of Suffixation and Prefixation in Iguta Language

<p>This paper dwells on a concise morphological description of Noun formation process involved in Iguta language (a minority endangered language in the north central, Nigeria). To this end, the paper explores the suffixation and prefixation processes involved in the formation of nouns of Iguta language. Ado’s (2017) 455 Iguta wordlists was employed as secondary data and was qualitatively used as instrument for the analyses in this paper. Ado’s 455 Iguta wordlists is primarily based on the standard dialect (i.e., Andirgiza) spoken by its native speakers in five selected towns in Jos North local government of the Plateau state, Nigeria. Hand analysis strategy and a thematic analytical process were used in developing insights on the language data during the analysis. The findings revealed <em>‘-char, -di and –e’ </em>morphs as suffixes<em> </em>to inflect while <em>‘t-, ti-, ha-, a-, an-, m-, i-, ma-, si-, ndu-, s-, tu-, tun-, tumu- </em>morphs as prefixes to either inflect or derive nouns. It is also observed that most singular nouns in Iguta are inflected to produce the plural forms using <strong><em>ti- </em></strong>or<strong><em> tu-</em></strong> prefixes especially when the pattern of the singular words begin with a vowel morpheme or phoneme. In accordance with the findings, it is suggested that prefixes and suffixes are part of the affixation process used in noun formation of Iguta language. In conclusion, the study has contributed in descriptive linguistics in terms inflectional or derivational suffixation and prefixation process used to build nouns in Iguta language. This paper may assist professional teachers and linguists in understanding the suffixations and prefixations existing in Iguta language.</p>

Modern Standard Arabic and Rural Palestinian Dialect: Patterns of the Active Participle

This paper was mainly concerned with analyzing the processes of active participle formation in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). It also aimed to examine the Rural Palestinian Dialect (RPD) in order to reveal the derivation of the active participle in this dialect and to describe any patterns that might vary from MSA. The study was based on the traditional notions of root and pattern which characterize Arabic morphology. The data for this study were collected from various sources. These sources are not researchers but they are people originated from Palestine. Then the data were analyzed in terms of morphology.

‘We don’t talk Gypsy here’: Minority language policies in Europe

Abstract The Roma constitute an ideal case of educational injustice meeting linguistic difference, racism, social marginalization, and poverty. This paper asks whether human-rights or capabilities approaches are best suited to address issues related to the language education of Roma students in Europe. These children are disadvantaged by not growing up with the standard dialect of whatever language is preferred by the mainstream population, and by the low status of the Romani language, and non-standard dialect of the standard language they usually speak. We examine language education for Roma students in Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, describing similarities and differences across contexts. We explain weak and strong version of language rights arguments, and the ways these principles are expressed, and not expressed in education policies. Sen’s capabilities approach can be employed to generate contextualized visions of education reform that speak directly to disadvantages suffered by Roma children.

Social network cohesion and the retreat from Southern vowels in Raleigh

AbstractNetwork research in sociolinguistics suggests that integration in a local community network promotes speakers' retention of local linguistic variants in the context of pressure from external or standard dialects. In most sociolinguistic network research, a speaker is assigned a single score along an index representing the aggregate of several network and other social features. We propose that contemporary network methods in adjacent disciplines can profitably apply to sociolinguistics, thereby facilitating not only more generalizable quantitative analysis but also new questions about therelationalnature of linguistic variables. Two network analysis methods—cohesive blocking and Quadratic Assignment Procedure regression—are used to evaluate the social network factors shaping the retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) in Raleigh, North Carolina. The data come from a 160-speaker subset of a conversational corpus. Significant network effects indicate that network proximity to Raleigh's urban core promotes retention of SVS features, and that network similarity between speakers corresponds to linguistic similarity. Contemporary social-network methods can contribute to linguistic analysis by providing a holistic picture of the community's structure. (Networks, sociophonetics, Southern Vowel Shift, dialect contact)*

К вопросу о формировании польскиx говоров в Литве: полемика вокруг Г. Турской

One of the most controversial problems in Polish historical dialectology is the ques­tion of the genesis of the Polish language in the North-East Borderland of Poland, i.e., the variety of the Polish language which has developed in the former territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL). Some important aspects of the evolution of this language – first of all – its dialectical substrate and the chronology of the development of its different variants, have still not received an unambiguous interpretation, and this has inspired fur­ther scientific research. Тhe article deals with the systematization of the main approaches to the chronology of the formation of Polish dialects in Lithuania. It includes a system­ic survey of the concepts made by important researchers of the Polish language of the borderland, such as K. Nitsch, H. Turska, J. Rieger, I. Grek-Pabisowa, I. Maryniakowa, V. Chekmonas and others.Historical circumstances in the GDL created a special relationship between the local Polish subdialects and the standard (cultural) dialect. Within the conditions of the autoch­thonic development of the language, its official sub-system is formed on the basis of the dialects, while we can observe the reverse process in Lithuania, as the Polish standard dialect was formed there much earlier than the rural dialects. The areas of the Polish rural subdialects had been formed in the GDL around the second half of the 19th century as a result of the gradual polonization of the Lithuanian and Belarusian countryside. The at­tempts of several scholars to shift the time of their formation to an earlier period of time, namely to the 16th-18th centuries, seem to be insufficiently convincing.

Beyond the “gentry aesthetic”: elites, Received Pronunciation and the dialectological gaze

ABSTRACTI argue here that sociolinguistic studies of elite accents have largely been trapped in a methodological and theoretical cul-de-sac, isolated from other work in dialectology, blinkered by outdated concepts of elite status, and entangled with ideologies about standard accents. I begin by presenting the hurdles that face scholars of elite accents in English. There have, firstly, been few robust empirical investigations of English elite accents and our understanding of them has not been integrated into theorisations of language variation and change. Secondly, there has been a consistent but problematic “gentry aesthetic” in work on such accents – a concentration on the aristocratic, landed, private school-educated elite. Thirdly, a cycle of ideological linkages between phonetic descriptions of English, elites and accent standards has led to an overpowering dominance of “Received Pronunciation” (RP) in debate about upper-class accents, preventing us from examining the everyday accents of elites independent both of century-old descriptions of RP and of the assumption that elite accents are standard accents. I conclude by outlining what a dialectology of elites might look like, freed from overpowering orientations to RP and the standard, and enabling elite accents to be integrated into sociolinguistic models of language variation.

Contacts de langues sans limites ?

AbstractThe typology of language contacts is an important issue of contact linguistics. Different configurations of contact situations, such as of creoles, interlects between standard languages and dialects, or even the emergence of Romance languages have been tried to be explained by ecolinguistic parameters, such as the rapidity of evolution or geographical distance. Contemporary urban vernaculars, i.e. the contact variety spoken in French peripheral urban districts, and the postcolonial contact in Maghrebine Francophony with Arabic varieties can be joined to the list of specific contact cases. The notion of « limit » can be considered an essential category in contact typology, and it turns out that Juri Lotman’s semiotic approach can assign a specifically dynamizing function to the limits of language contacts. Under globalization conditions, even apparently very different outcomes of language contact can be explained by common underlying principles, even if we may accept the idea of a rupture in sociological terms.