Interspeaker variation among Shetland Islanders as the long term outcome of dialectally varied input : speech production evidence for fine-grained linguistic plasticity

This is a slightly revised version of Scobbie, J.M. (2005) Interspeaker variation as the long-term outcome of dialectally varied input: speech production evidence for fine-grained plasticity. Proceedings of the Workshop on Plasticity in Speech perception. This WP-2 version includes corrected graphs and should be cited in preference to the published version appearing in those proceedings - see the note about the corrections. The major publications on this Shetlandic dataset are [2], and Marie Cluness's undergraduate project, available at QMUC. This series consists of unpublished working- papers. They are not final versions and may be superseded by publication in journal or book form, which should be cited in preference. All rights remain with the author(s) at this stage, and circulation of a work in progress in this series does not prejudice its later publication. Comments to authors are welcome.The English stop voicing contrast is examined in both word-initial position (via VOT) and word-final position (via the duration of the preceding vowel) in young adult speakers born and brought up in the Shetland Isles. The subjects' parents were either also from Shetland, from elsewhere in Scotland, or England. All have identical phonemic stop systems, unambiguously so in initial position. The quasi-phonemic role in Scottish English of vowel duration in signalling the suffixual vs. tautomorphemic word final /d/ instead of the /t/-/d/ contrast (the Scottish Vowel Length Rule) renders final position more complex. There are fine-grained interspeaker differences covering a wide area of the phonetic space, exemplifying the potential for phonologically-relevant variation. The targets may be speaker-specific responses to input, especially mismatches between the dialect of their parents and the wider community.casl[1] Allen, J. S., Miller, J. L. and DeSteno, D. Individual talker differences in voice-onset-time, J. Acoust. Soc. Amer., Vol. 113: 544-552, 2003. [2] Scobbie, J. M. Flexibility in the Face of Incompatible English VOT Systems, in Goldstein, L. M., Best, C. and Whalen, D. (eds.) Papers in Laboratory Phonology 8: Varieties of Phonological Competence, CUP, Cambridge, in press. [3] van Leyden, K. Prosodic Characteristics of Orkney and Shetland Dialects: An Experimental Approach, LOT, Utrecht, 2004. [4] van Leyden, K. The relationship between vowel and consonant duration in Orkney and Shetland dialects, Phonetica, Vol. 59: 1-19. [5] McKenna, G. E. Vowel duration in the Standard English of Scotland. Unpublished M.Litt. Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1988. [6] Scobbie, J. M, Hewlett, N., and Turk A. E. Standard English in Edinburgh and Glasgow: the Scottish vowel length rule revealed. In Foulkes, P. and Docherty, G. (eds.) Urban Voices: Variation and Change in British Accents. London, Arnold, 230-245, 1999. [7] Scobbie, J. M. The phonetics-phonology overlap. In Ramchand, G. and Reiss, C. (eds.) The Book of Interfaces, in press. [8] Lehiste, I. Suprasegmental features of speech. In Lass, N. J. (ed.) Principles of Experimental Phonetics. St. Louis: Mosby, 226-244, 1996. [9] Scobbie, J. M, Turk, A. E. and Hewlett, N. Morphemes, phonetics and lexical items: the case of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule, Proc. ICPhS, 1617-1620. [10] Cho, T. and Ladefoged, P. Variation and universals in VOT: evidence from 18 languages, J. Phon., 27, 207-229, 1999. [11] Pisoni, D. B. Some thoughts on 'normalisation' in speech perception. In Johnson, K. and Mullenix, J. K. (eds.), Talker Variability in Speech Processing. London, Academic Press, 9-32, 1997.unpub140unpu

Minority languages between reformation and revolution

In this thesis, I intend to further our knowledge of the sociolinguistics of Early Modern minority languages. Social and political developments in North-Western Europe in the 16th to 18th centuries caused an emancipation of vernacular languages, which took over from Latin as the main language in official domains. The sociolinguistics of this change are well known (e.g. Burke 2004); the fate of languages that did not make it to this new status, emerging ‘minority languages’, remains under-researched. Chapter 2 introduces some of the terminology used in this study. I discuss four categories of research methods into minority language shift and how they are applicable to research on historical situations, which often suffers from ‘bad data’. I then present a model of ethnolinguistic vitality that I use to survey the socio-historical backgrounds of several minority language groups in Chapter 3. Chapter 3 begins with a brief presentation of minority language groups from the Early Modern period. I choose three language groups to focus on in more depth: speakers of Norn in Shetland, of Flemish in Northern France, and of Sorbian in Germany. A survey of these three cases, with the initial wider presentation, identifies three recurring issues that are the focus of the subsequent chapters. The first of these is the influence of demographic change (Chapter 4). In the formation of nation-states in this period, many speakers of the majority language migrate to peripheral minority-language areas. I present two historical-demographic studies showing the integration of immigrants into the local community through intermarriage, based on 17th-century population registers from Shetland and Dunkirk (France). Both show a large amount of intermarriage, despite a bias towards in-group marriage. Intermarriage brings the majority language into the minority-language home; the strength of the bias against intermarriage is likely to be a factor in the rate of shift, one of the main differences between Shetland and Dunkirk. Language policies are the topic of Chapter 5. They are an important part of minority language studies in the present day, particularly with regard to language maintenance. I survey the language legislation that existed in Shetland, French Flanders, and Lusatia, its purpose and implementation, and its effects on language shift. Purpose and implementation of language policies were limited, and its effect on minority language communities therefore only secondary. Chapter 6 is about target varieties in language shift. The question of whether language shift happened through education in a standard variety or through contacts with majoritylanguage speakers from nearby areas can be answered by looking at the new majoritylanguage dialect in the minority area. I undertake two different studies in this context. The first is an analysis of Shetland Scots using theories of dialect contact. The dialect has a number of ‘standardised’ features, but I argue these are mainly due to koinéisation of various dialects of Scots immigrants to Shetland and a second-language variety of Scots spoken by the local population. The second is a study of the French dialect of French Flanders using computational methods of data comparison on data taken from dialect atlases. This dialect shares features with neighbouring Picard dialects, but we can also identify Standard French features. This pattern correlates with what we know of migration to the area (Chapter 4). Both new dialects suggest the shifting population acquired the majority language mainly through contacts with majority-language speakers in their direct environment. In conclusion, I show that language shift in the Early Modern period was an organic process, where the inception, the rate, and the result of shift were steered by the minority population’s social networks. The influence of institutions often blamed for language shift in modern situations – educational and language policies – was very restricted. In addition, I show that methods used in modern sociolinguistics can be successfully applied to historical situations, despite the bad data problem. This opens the door for more extensive research into the area

On the Prosody of Orkney and Shetland Dialects

Fonetische correlaten en communicatieve functies van linguïstische structuu

Acquisition of Scottish English Phonology: an overview

This series consists of unpublished working- papers. They are not final versions and may be superseded by publication in journal or book form, which should be cited in preference. All rights remain with the author(s) at this stage, and circulation of a work in progress in this series does not prejudice its later publication. Comments to authors are welcome.Scottish English is usually characterized as a language continuum from Broad Scots to Scottish Standard English- (Corbett, McClure & Stuart-Smith, 2003, p.2). A 1996 survey preparatory to the 2001 census by the General Register Office (Scotland) estimated that about 30% of the Scottish population use (Broad) Scots to some extent, rising to 90% in the North East. The linguistic situation on the ground is complicated somewhat by population movement and dialect contact (as well as uncertainty about what constitutes Scots or Scottish Standard English (SSE) in the first place). Scots derives from the Anglian variety of Old English spoken in the 6th century, and varies regionally, whereas SSE is far more homogenous geographically. Scots speakers still tend only to be exposed in childhood to a Scottish English continuum which is rooted in their own local variety of Scots and so are not influenced much by other geographically delimited broad varieties. This continuum is of course just one aspect of sociolinguistic variation and is itself always undergoing language change: large differences should be expected between older more conservative speakers and the young as well as regionally and socio-economically. In the urban setting, local housing variation means that adjacent neighbourhoods may have markedly different linguistic profiles. Even the two ends of the Scots-SSE continuum are largely mutually intelligible, though mastery of SSE will not prepare someone new to Scotland (or indeed nave Scots themselves) for the difficulties they will face in understanding a broad speaker from an unfamiliar area. In general, the closely-related varieties of Scottish English can be thought of as being parallel with - but independent from - the other Englishes of the UK, but with their own national focus, however vague that is. The size, proximity and influence of England, as well as population movements mean, however, that historically and synchronically, the Scottish English continuum is attracted towards its English neighbour.caslunpub149unpu

Quasi-phonemic contrast and the fuzzy inventory: examples from Scottish English

This series consists of unpublished working- papers. They are not final versions and may be superseded by publication in journal or book form, which should be cited in preference. All rights remain with the author(s) at this stage, and circulation of a work in progress in this series does not prejudice its later publication. Comments to authors are welcome. A draft of a chapter to appear in Peter Avery,Elan B. Dresher and Keren Rice (eds.). Contrast: perception and acquisition: selected papers from the second international conference in contrast in phonology. Toronto: Mouton de Gruyter / University of Toronto, due for publication 2006-2007.In this article we propose that contrast must be treated as a gradient phenomenon at the phonological level, with membership of a phonemic inventory being a matter of degree. This is because, though minimal pairs provide simple and strong evidence of contrast, things are not always so straightforward. Defining minimal- is one challenge; as is determining which aspects of a contrast are distinctive and which redundant. Non-phonological information is sometimes a necessary consideration. These complications are usually thought to affect the analysis of a phenomenon in a discrete way, tipping the binary balance held by the phonologist towards either one analysis or another. We, on the other hand, see the necessity of evaluating contrastive evidence and of taking other linguistic information into account as being an indication that contrastiveness is a scalar property. We address some patterns in the sound system of Scottish English; ones which provide less than clear evidence of phonemicity - or, as we think, evidence of less than clear phonemicity.caslpub150pu

A perceptual and experimental phonetic approach to dialect stereotypes : the tonada cordobesa of Argentina

textThis study investigates the perception of vowel lengthening in the tonada cordobesa, a feature of the Spanish spoken in Córdoba, Argentina. Unlike other dialects of Argentine Spanish, lengthening occurs in the pre-tonic syllable (Fontanella de Weinberg 1971; Yorio 1973; Lang 2010) and is believed to be accompanied by a pitch peak (Fontanella de Weinberg 1971). The goals of this dissertation are to determine if duration alone (i.e., without intonational changes) is significant in identifying a speaker’s Cordoba provenance, and to discover what listener features affect perception. A matched-guise methodology presents speech tokens with natural and manipulated pre-tonic vowel durations to Argentine listeners in a dialect identification task. Results show a main effect of speaker region and token type (natural versus manipulated). Shorter durations made Córdoba speakers difficult to identify, reducing accuracy from 59% for natural tokens to 28% for manipulated tokens with shortened pre-tonic syllables. Buenos Aires speakers received the highest identification accuracy for natural tokens (80%) and Tucumán speakers the lowest (43%). Longer pre-tonic vowel durations are associated with a Córdoba identity, regardless of speaker origin and other linguistic cues. Control tokens produced by speakers from Buenos Aires and Tucumán confirmed this effect: these tokens, when manipulated to have a longer pre-tonic vowel, induced the perception of a Córdoba identity. Listener experience is also shown to improve accuracy of dialect identification: listeners of more geographically distant provinces, relative to the speaker’s province of origin, present significantly reduced identification rates. Acoustical analyses of the Cordoba samples confirm pre-tonic lengthening as well as an early peak rise within the stressed syllable, and valley alignment before the onset of this syllable. Pre-tonic, tonic and post-tonic syllable durations are lengthened, resulting in a segmentally unbalanced intonational phrase for which prominence is disproportionately concentrated in these final segments. The durational, intonational, and rhythmic properties make the Cordoba dialect unique among regional lects within Argentina and across the Spanish-speaking world. This research contributes experimental evidence for the prosodic features marking this dialect and supports its saliency and social significance within Argentina.Spanish and Portugues

Manx English: a phonological investigation into levelling and diffusion from across the water

This study aims to locate the Isle of Man within the sociolinguistic field of language variation and change. Stigmatised features of speech on island communities are often cited as examples to discuss accent levelling (the loss of traditional features), in addition, the research into geographical diffusion (the inclusion of features from outside) on islands demonstrates the extent of spread that certain features reach. However, there are also certain resistance strategies and barriers islanders can put up. The English spoken on the Isle of Man (referred to as Manx English) has had little coverage within the investigation of linguistic issues. Both apparent- and real-time analysis methods are presented within this thesis. Previous phonological analysis from two separate studies (SED in 1950s/1960s and Recording Mann in 1999) were used to compare to the original corpus created for this thesis. Different generations of families were also analysed for synchronic changes in dialect features. Recordings were obtained through sociolinguistic interviews and were analysed auditorily and acoustically. The overarching aims of the research are to assess the influence of accent features from outside the community,investigate features, which may have been lost over time, and to discuss the social and linguistic factors, which determine the acceptance or resistance of some features. Findings vary from feature to feature. This thesis discovered that there are elements of traditional Manx English that are upheld (vowel lenghtening). The GOAT vowel is showing interesting variation from young to old speakers depending on influences (Liverpool for younger speakers,traditional Manx English forms for older) and the incoming tide of the glottal stop is reaching the Island’s shores. This thesis investigates the mechanisms of change and finds both internal and external factors affect the production of English on the Isle of Man