Intonation of Greek in contact with Turkish: A diachronic study

Asia Minor Greek (AMG) speakers cohabited with Turkish speakers for eight hundred years until the 1923 Lausanne Convention, which forced a two-way mass population exchange between Turkey and Greece and severed their everyday contact. We compare the intonation of the continuation rise tune in the speech of first-generation AMG speakers born in Turkey with three subsequent generations born in Greece. We examine how long contact effects in intonation persist after contact has ceased, through comparison of the f0 patterns in four generations of AMG speakers with those of their Athenian Greek- and Turkish-speaking contemporaries. The speech of the first-generation of AMG speakers exhibits two patterns in the f0 curve shape and time alignment of the continuation rises, one Athenian-like and one Turkish-like. Over subsequent generations use of the latter diminishes, while the Athenian pattern becomes more frequent, indicating intergenerational change.Academy of Athens ; Economic and Social Research Counci

Estuary English

The term ‘Estuary English’ (EE) first appeared in 1984 labelling a host of developments observed in the speech of the southeast of England, expected to be a major source of impact on the pronunciation of southern British English for years to come. While linguists are sceptical as to the existence of a uniform, well definable variety in the Home Counties, the term, which passed into wide use, appears to be readily understood by the general public four decades since its inception, conjuring a stereotype of a fashionable younger speaker. The present chapter looks at the early definitions of the term and the hype surrounding it. It presents data from its supposed heartland, the Home Counties, in the light of developments in standard and non-standard accents (dialect levelling) and concludes that EE is a social construct rather than a definable linguistic phenomenon

Phonetic imitation of t-glottaling by Czech speakers of English

14216

Phonetic imitation in L2 speech: Immediate imitation of English consonant glottalization by speakers of Polish

Phonetic imitation is a ubiquitous process in speech production. Speakers have a strong tendency to imitate their interlocutors both in a native and a non-native language. It is especially important in acquiring non-native speech, because it allows forming new sound categories. In the current study we investigated whether and to what extent Polish learners of English are able to imitate tglottalization observed especially in British English. A total of 25 Polish learners of English imitated English models’ productions with t-glottalization that were subsequently compared to their default productions (pre-test) and post-exposure production (post-test). The results showed that the participants successfully imitated t-glottalization after the exposure to the model talker. The generalisation effect was limited in its magnitude in that only some of the non-imitated words had traces of glottalization. The results are discussed in terms of the differences in the implementation of glottalization in Polish and English and of how phonetic imitation informs second-language speech acquisition

Greek in Contact project: Intonation and diachrony: A phonetic investigation of the effects of language contact on intonational patterns.

instructions_curve_fitting_process.docx Greek_in_contact_project_information.doc