Placing accents: A quantitative, perceptual dialectological study of language variation in West Frisian.

Abstract

There is a moderate body of work on Frisian dialectology, but no known insight about how Frisians perceive and recognize regional variation. The current study investigates the recognition of Frisian varieties using the map-based accent-recognition task and examines how accurately Frisian listeners can recognize speakers’ regional origin, which Frisian accents listeners distinguish and whether perceptual isoglosses delineate different accents. The online accent-recognition task included forty fragments of regionally accented spontaneous speech from a geographically representative selection of the main Frisian dialect areas, which listeners had to map to the speaker’s origin. The multinomial GAM showed that Frisian listeners were generally very accurate at recognizing speakers’ origins. The cluster analyses charted an empirical map of listeners’ perceptual boundaries. The clusters reproduce the east-west division between the two largest dialects (Clay/Wood Frisian) as we know it from traditional dialectology but show a different north/south boundary for the third dialect (Southwest-Corner Frisian).