Estimating the Level and Direction of Phonetic Dialect Change in the Northern Netherlands

This article reports ongoing investigations into phonetic change of dialect groups in the northern Netherlandic language area, particularly the Frisian and Low Saxon dialect groups, which are known to differ in vitality. To achieve this, we combine existing phonetically transcribed corpora with dialectometric approaches that allow us to quantify change among older male dialect speakers in a real-time framework. A multidimensional variant of the Levenshtein distance, combined with methods that induce realistic phonetic distances between transcriptions, is used to estimate how much dialect groups have changed between 1990 and 2010, and whether they changed towards Standard Dutch or away from it. Our analyses indicate that language change is a slow process in this geographical area. Moreover, the Frisian and Groningen dialect groups seem to be most stable, while the other Low Saxon varieties (excluding the Groningen dialect group) were shown to be most prone to change. We offer possible explanations for our findings, while we discuss shortcomings of the data and approach in detail, as well as desiderata for future research

Estimating the level and direction of aggregated sound change of dialects in the Northern Netherlands

This article reports investigations into sound change at the community-level of Frisian and Low Saxon dialect groups in the north of the Netherlands, which differ in key factors influencing dialect decline. We combine phonetically transcribed corpora with dialectometric approaches that can quantify change among older male dialect speakers in a real-time framework. A multidimensional variant of the Levenshtein distance, combined with methods that induce realistic distances between sounds, is used to estimate how much dialect groups converged to and diverged from Standard Dutch between 1990 and 2010. Our analyses indicate that sound change is a slow process in this geographical area. The Frisian and North Low Saxon dialect groups seem to be most stable, while Westphalian Low Saxon varieties seem to be most prone to change. We offer possible explanations for our findings and discuss shortcomings of the data and approach in detail

Comparison of Word Intelligibility in Spoken and Sung Phrases

Twenty listeners were exposed to spoken and sung passages in English produced by three trained vocalists. Passages included representative words extracted from a large database of vocal lyrics, including both popular and classical repertoires. Target words were set within spoken or sung carrier phrases. Sung carrier phrases were selected from classical vocal melodies. Roughly a quarter of all words sung by an unaccompanied soloist were misheard. Sung passages showed a seven-fold decrease in intelligibility compared with their spoken counterparts. The perceptual mistakes occurring with vowels replicate previous studies showing the centralization of vowels. Significant confusions are also evident for consonants, especially voiced stops and nasals

Combining research methods for an experimental study of West Central Bavarian vowels in adults and children

The overall goal of this thesis was to systematically measure defining vowel characteristics of the West Central Bavarian (WCB) dialect for an acoustically based analysis of the Bavarian vowel system and simultaneously investigate to what extent these characteristics are being preserved across generations and if there is a sound change in progress observable in which young speakers show more characteristics of Standard German (SG) than old on some Bavarian vowel attributes. In order to address these aims we conducted acoustic recordings of WCB speaking adults and WCB speaking primary school children which were then compared to each other with an apparent-time analysis. For a more accurate view of changes in progress we combined this apparent-time comparison with longitudinal data from the WCB children, obtained at annually intervals expanding over three years. The acoustic data was enhanced by articulatory data gained from ultrasound recordings of a subset of the same WCB speaking children at two timepoints with one year interval. Analyses of the acoustic data revealed both adult/child and longitudinal changes in the direction of the standard in the children’s tendency towards a merger of two open vowels and a collapse of a long/short consonant contrast, neither of which exist in SG. There was some evidence that children in comparison with adults were beginning to develop both tensity and rounding contrasts which occur in SG but not WCB. There were no observed changes to the pattern of opening and closing diphthongs which differ markedly between the two varieties. Also, within the WCB front vowel that resulted historically from /l/-vocalization and for which articulatory data from a subset of the children was put into relation with the acoustic measures no changes were observed. The general conclusion is that WCB change is most likely to occur as a consequence of exaggerating phonetic variation that already happens to be in the direction of the standard and therefore internal factors motivated by general principles of vowel change might play a more decisive role in inducing a shift than external factors like dialect contact