Swedish is beautiful, Danish is ugly? Investigating the link between language attitudes and spoken word recognition

Abstract

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.

Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages

“…Finally, extra-linguistic factors might also play a role in intelligibility. A positive attitude to a related language could be related to the success in decoding it (Schüppert, Hilton and Gooskens 2015). The amount of contact with this language is also bound to play a role: the more exposed a listener is to a related language, the more likely she is to understand it.…”

Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Factors Affecting Intelligibility Across Closely Related Varieties in Pentecost Island, Vanuatu.

“…However, the link demonstrated in experimental settings has been rather weak (e.g. Delsing & Lundin Åkesson, 2005;Schüppert et al 2015). It is possible that part of the explanation for the low intelligibility results for Suru Kavian is that the participants from the other villages have ambivalent attitudes towards this distinctive dialect, while the attitudes among Suru Kavian speakers towards other Apma and Raga varieties are more accommodating.…”

The role of orthographic and phonetic distances in mutual intelligibility between Montenegrin and Bulgarian

“…From the very beginning, researchers working on intelligibility between Indo-European languages largely focused on the Scandinavian language area (e.g. Zeevaert, 2004;Gooskens, 2006Gooskens, , 2007van Bezooijen & Gooskens, 2007;Beijering et al, 2008, Schüppert, 2011, Schüppert et al, 2015, as speakers of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish have communicated with each other using their own L1s for centuries. The level of intelligibility of other closely related Germanic languages such as Dutch, German and Afrikaans has also attracted some scholarly attention (e.g.…”