Regional variation in ongoing sound change: The case of the Dutch diphthongs

Abstract

This paper discusses the regional variation in four ongoing sound changes in the Dutch vowels /eː,øː,oː,ɛi,œy/ that are conditioned by a following coda /l/. The synchronic diatopic diffusion of these changes is charted using the Dutch teacher corpus, a comprehensive dataset containing word-list data from four regions in The Netherlands and four in Flanders. Comparisons are made of the five vowels preceding nonapproximant consonants and preceding coda /l/. To avoid manually segmenting the oftentimes highly gradient vowel–/l/ boundary, GAMMs are used to model whole formant trajectories. Comparisons are then made of trajectories and of peaks of trajectories. The results are used to classify the nature of the four sound changes in terms of phonetic and lexical abruptness/graduality and to show that the changes are intertwined in such a way that they can only be considered as separate facets of a single, currently ongoing vowel shift.

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).…”