Evaluating Regional Accent Variation in Standard Dutch

Abstract

This article investigates native speakers' attitudes toward accent variation in Netherlandic Standard Dutch. Adopting the speaker evaluation paradigm, a demographically controlled sample of listener-judges rated spontaneous speech samples that are representative of four regions in the Netherlands, and from which potentially competing linguistic cues (e.g., pitch and intonation) had not been removed. Speech stimuli were rated on a set of scales integrated from among previous studies conducted in the Low Countries. Regionally marked standard accents activated distinct attitude profiles that were largely invariant with respect to the age, gender, level of education, and regional provenance of the listener-judges. It is argued that these regionally flavored standard varieties were found to be more than social categorization cues: Data reveal that an accent elicits perceptions of its socalled intrinsic euphony and norm status in addition to the status and integrity of its speakers.Although the Dutch language has received attention from perceptual dialectologists and sociolinguistics since Weijnen (1946), research has concentrated almost exclusively on how nonstandard regional varieties are evaluated vis-à-vis Standard Dutch. Surprisingly, little is known about how accent variation in Standard Dutch is perceived. Now, it is generally assumed that regional pronunciation characteristics are penetrating the speech of Netherlandic Standard speakers, leading to the emergence

Is Standard Dutch with a regional accent standard or not? Evidence from native speakers' attitudes

“…It should be noted, first, that the regional identification of the Rand, North, and South accents is less successful in this experiment than in the previous one (Grondelaers et al, 2010), in which the three accents concerned were correctly identified in the range between 75.8% and 90.8%. Especially problematic in the present experiment is the fact that the second North speaker's accent is more frequently identified as a Randstad than as a Northern accent, with evaluations that converge more (in general) with the Randstad speakers' perceptions than with those of the other North speaker.…”

“…This manipulation also enabled us to investigate whether regional accent is still the most potent attitude trigger when competing with explicit social cues. In Grondelaers et al (2010), we found that regional accent is by far the strongest attitude trigger when competing with other low-and high-level linguistic cues. But what happens when a speech sample contains accent triggers as well as social cues?…”

“…Per speaker, a neutral guise and a teacher guise were subsequently constructed. Although we made a plea in Grondelaers et al (2010) for the use of spontaneous speech stimuli in speaker evaluation experiments, we were unable to find any 20-second stretches of running speech in our interviews on the basis of which speakers could univocally be identified as teachers. In order to implement the social variable, we therefore had no choice but to assemble 20-second samples from 3-, 4-, and 5-second snippets of running discourse.…”

“…From the Teacher Corpus, two speakers were selected for each of the three accents that were correctly identified in more than 75% of all cases in Grondelaers et al (2010), namely the Randstad accent (Rand), the Northern accent (North), and the Southern accent (Limburg). Per speaker, a neutral guise and a teacher guise were subsequently constructed.…”

“…These data reveal that accented Dutch is unacceptable in a job interview situation. In Grondelaers et al (2010), we discussed two causes for concern in Heijmer and Vonk's (2002) methodology. To begin with, the noncontrastive stimulus presentation method (only one stimulus per respondent) may underspecify available social meanings that would be activated in a more contrastive frame of reference (Abrams & Hogg, 1987) featuring different accent varieties.…”