Phonetic divergence in bilingual speakers is modulated by language attitude

Abstract

Bilingual speakers’ speech varies phonetically according to many factors such as age of arrival and of acquisition of the second language (L2) (e.g., Flege et al., 1999). However, such temporal factors may not be as relevant to populations with more uniform language experience, as in pervasively multilingual societies. In such diglossic situations, speakers’ attitudes toward each of their languages may have a stronger influence on everyday pronunciation, as they do for language learning (Moyer, 2007) and phonetic accommodation to interlocutors (Dmitrieva et al., 2015). This study was designed to determine whether bilingual speakers’ attitude toward their language(s) and associated culture(s) modulates phonetic properties of their speech. Native Cantonese-English bilinguals living in Hong Kong (N = 20) produced near homophones in both languages under conditions emphasizing each language on different days. The degree of diphthongization of Cantonese /o/ and English /oʊ/, and Cantonese /aɪ/ and English /ɑɪ/ were quantified acoustically and compared to attitude scores elicited in a questionnaire. Participants with a more positive attitude toward Cantonese showed larger cross-language differences in diphthongization of these pairs, demonstrating an effect of language attitude on phonetic properties of speech and highlighting the contribution of sociolinguistic factors to phonetic variability in diglossic contexts.