Educated Poznań speech 30 years later

Abstract

The study compares educated Poznań speech on the basis of a study by Witaszek-Samborska (1985, 1986) and a corpus compiled 30 years later. The features of Poznań speech, examined on 14 speakers from the corpus, include: voicing of obstruents before heterolexical sonorants (okszyg emocji), realization of word-final ‹-ą› as [-ɔm] (idom tom drogom), realization of /stʂ tʂ dʐ/ as /ʂ  / (szczelać), the presence of the velar nasal [ŋ] before a heteromorphemic velar plosive /k/ (okienko), realization of word-final ‹-ej› as /-i(j)/ or /-ɨ(j)/ (lepi(j)), presence of prothetic [w] before word-initial /ɔ/ (łojciec), presence of voiced /v/ in clusters with preceding voiceless consonants (trwały), and realization of ‹-śmy› as [ʑmɨ] (słyszelˈiśmy). The results suggest a change in Poznań speech and point towards dialect levelling. 1 We would like to thank our audience at the 47 th Poznan Linguistic Meeting, in particular to Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Raymond Hickey and Peter Trudgill for their comments and suggestions. We have included the implicational hierarchy and the result is, we believe, a stronger article. Our three anonymous reviewers deserve special mention as their insights prompted exacting revisions to our original manuscript. Last but not least, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Ministry of Higher Education which contributed to corpus collection (grant number: 0113/NPRH2/H11/81/2013).

Word-final /ɔ̃/ in Greater Poland Polish: A Cumulative Context Effect?

“…Nasal stopping was common, and 53% of participants used nasal stopping exclusively or almost exclusively (particularly in the oldest generation). Seeking to complement Witaszek-Samborska's apparent-time study with real-time data, Kaźmierski, Kul and Zydorowicz (2019) measured the nasal stopping rate in 14 college students from Poznań, a group comparable to the youngest speaker group in Witaszek-Samborska's study. In Kaźmierski et al (2019), only 3 out the 14 speakers had a nasal stopping rate above 50%, and the overall nasal stopping rate was rather low (25%).…”

“…Seeking to complement Witaszek-Samborska's apparent-time study with real-time data, Kaźmierski, Kul and Zydorowicz (2019) measured the nasal stopping rate in 14 college students from Poznań, a group comparable to the youngest speaker group in Witaszek-Samborska's study. In Kaźmierski et al (2019), only 3 out the 14 speakers had a nasal stopping rate above 50%, and the overall nasal stopping rate was rather low (25%). In a linguistics study, Baranowska and Kaźmierski (2020) investigated the association between the social variables of age, sex, education and location (urban vs. rural), as well as speaking style and the realization of Polish nasal vowels in the speech of 50 Greater Poland residents.…”