How long is ‘a long term’ for sound change?

Abstract

This paper investigates the adoption of ongoing community sound change by individuals by considering it as an instance of second-dialect acquisition. Four ongoing changes in Dutch, all involving the move from one-allophone to two-allophone systems, make this possible: these ongoing diachronic changes are simultaneously a source of synchronic variation between Netherlandic Dutch and Flemish Dutch. The paper investigates the adoption of these differences by sociolinguistic migrants: Flemish-Dutch speakers who migrated to the Netherlands to start their university studies. Participants were tracked over the course of nine months, using a rhyme-decision task and a word-list-reading task. Results show robust differences from Netherlandic-Dutch controls, which do not diminish over the nine months. While longer-term accommodation to these same changes has been found elsewhere, it appears that nine months is not enough time. The implications of these findings for various subfields of linguistics, particularly sound change and second-dialect acquisition, are discussed.

Social factors in accent recognition: a large-scale study in perceptual dialectology

“…Many production studies have examined the phonetic features that show geographical variation in Dutch. Variation has widely been shown at the segmental level, that is, the amount of voicing in fricatives ( Van de Velde, Gerritsen & van Hout, 1996), the articulation of /ɣ, x/ (van der Harst, Van de Velde & Schouten, 2007), the pronunciation of /r/ (Sebregts, 2015;Van de Velde & van Hout, 1999), the different degrees of diphthongization of /eː, øː, oː/ (van der Harst, 2011;Voeten, 2020Voeten, , 2021aVoeten, , 2021b) but also at the suprasegmental level (Gooskens, 1997). We know that listeners can use these regional features to identify speakers' regional provenances, though the accuracy and extent of these regional connotations seem to depend on both the accentedness of the speakers and the experience of the listener (Van Bezooijen & Gooskens, 1999;Pinget et al, 2014).…”