Swedish is beautiful, Danish is ugly? Investigating the link between language attitudes and intelligibility

This paper investigates the hypothesis that attitudes towards a linguistic variety and intelligibility of that variety are linked. This is done by eliciting language attitudes and word recognition scores in 154 Danish and Swedish schoolchildren and adolescents between 7 and 16 years. Language attitudes towards the neighboring language are elicited by means of a matched-guise experiment while word recognition is tested by auditorily presenting the participants with 50 spoken stimuli in their neighboring language (Danish for Swedish children and vice versa) in a picture-pointing task. Results revealed that while Danish children held more positive attitudes towards Swedish than vice versa and their word recognition scores were generally higher than those of their Swedish peers, the correlation between these two variables is very low, indicating that the two variables are only loosely linked

Salience is in the eye of the beholder:Increased pupil size reflects acoustically salient variables

‘Salience’ is a term frequently used in linguistics but an exact definition for the concept is lacking. Recent technological advances which allow us to explore the cognitive processing of so-called salient linguistic features could provide us with quantifiable measures of ‘salience’, and lead to a further understanding of the concept and its relationship to language acquisition and change. In this paper we measure pupil dilation with the assumption that auditory salience results in a change in pupil size, as an effect of cognitive load. We report an experimental study observing Dutch participants' pupil sizes when listening to stimuli containing salient and non-salient variants of linguistic variables (e.g. Dutch coda/r/; speech intensity, word frequency). Using Generalized Additive Mixed Modelling (GAMM), we find pupil size increases for three of six stimuli categories. We consider our findings in light of the speech processing literature, address the (dis)advantages of the technique, and formulate some recommendations for future advances in neurophysiological measures in (socio)linguistics

Regional Dialect Levelling and Language Standards: Changes in the Hønefoss Dialect

This is a sociolinguistic investigation of regional dialect levelling and the role that standardised language plays for this particular type of dialect change. This study combines a quantitative variationist investigation of linguistic variation and change in East Norwegian cities Hønefoss and Oslo with experimental and qualitative studies of attitudinal data in Hønefoss. The aim of the study is to shed light on the role that standard language ideologies play for loss of localised dialects. Varieties of East Norwegian spoken in the small city Hønefoss and the capital city Oslo are becoming increasingly alike. Oslo speech is an influential factor in the loss in Hønefoss of local linguistic variants in variables 3pl personal pronouns and . The force behind the regional dialect levelling is not the Oslo dialect only, however. Overt and covert attitudinal data show that the influence is twofold and that the codified written variety of Norwegian, Bokmål, largely influences speakers’ usage of local variants for linguistic variables stress in loanwords and plural definite article suffixes. The investigation considers linguistic ideals that speakers link to codification of language (correctness), education or the capital city and attest that language that can be linked to all these ideals is becoming more widely used in the East Norway region. Speech that can be linked to the codified variety Bokmål is an overt as well as a covert ideal to speakers in Hønefoss. Covert positive attitudes towards speech from Oslo are also found. This study shows that the social and political context of language must be taken into account in the study of loss of linguistic features. The social meaning of language is crucial in informing us about the social mechanisms behind dialect change