perceptual dialectology
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Perceptual dialectology is the study of how nonlinguists perceive variation in language—where they believe it exists, where they believe it comes from, how they believe it functions, and how they socially evaluate it. Perceptual dialectology differs from standard
dialectology Dialectology (from Greek , ''dialektos'', "talk, dialect"; and , '' -logia'') is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their ass ...
in that it is concerned not with formal
linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
differences among
dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...
s, but rather with how nonlinguists perceive them (which may or may not correlate with scientific linguistic findings). Because it focuses on nonlinguists' views of linguistic concepts, perceptual dialectology is considered a subset of the study of
folk linguistics Folk linguistics consists of statements, beliefs, or practices concerning language which are based on uninformed speculation rather than the scientific method. Folk linguistics sometimes arises when scientific conclusions about language come off as ...
, as well as part of the general field of
sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural Norm (sociology), norms, expectations, and context (language use), context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on languag ...
. Common topics in the study of perceptual dialectology include the comparison of folk perceptions of dialect boundaries with traditional linguistic definitions, the examination of what factors influence folk perceptions of variation, and what social characteristics individuals attribute to various dialects.


History

Linguists disagree on whether the beginnings of perceptual dialectology can be traced to the 1920s in Japan or the
Netherlands ) , anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau") , image_map = , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands , established_title = Before independence , established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
in the 1930s. A pioneering study in traditional perceptual dialectology took place in the Netherlands in 1939 and was conducted by W.G. Rensink. The study sought to investigate perceptual dialect boundaries through a Dutch dialect survey in which subjects were asked to state whether they thought other people spoke the same or different dialect as them, and what the dialect difference was if there was deemed to be any. Weijnen analyzed this data through the little-arrow method that she devised. Many studies proceeded from this, and perceptual dialectology surveys took place in various countries. Perceptual dialectology studies in Japan were also taking place during the early 20th century. Japanese methodology was fundamentally different from the Netherlands' in that informants were asked to judge differences between dialects on degrees of difference (for example, from 'not different' to 'incomprehensible'). Data was thus analyzed by drawing lines between areas to indicate a scale of difference, and was the first method in 'calculating' perceptual boundaries. Linguists became increasingly interested in how non-linguists distinguish between language varieties, including the fact that
pitch accent A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ...
is one of the major ways that non-linguists distinguish between varieties. Contemporary perceptual dialectology was spearheaded by Dennis Preston, who is seen to be the major proponent of perceptual dialectology. His five-point approach to the study has been a benchmark for the advancement of the field. Language attitude studies and its related matched-guise methodology are also seen to be related to perceptual dialectology.


Methodology 1.0


Little arrow method

The little arrow method is an early method for comparing regional dialects. In the little arrows method, researchers begin with a general map of a region, often with traditional linguistic dialect boundaries indicated for reference. Then, informants from several sites are asked how similar they believe the language of other sites is to their own. Sites which participants indicate as being extremely similar are connected by a "little arrow." By gathering responses from several informants and sites, these "little arrows" connect to form networks of related languages. From this information, information on perceptual dialectical boundaries can be drawn. Perceptual dialect categories consist of areas linked together by the "little arrows," and dialect borders are indicated when there are no connections between sites. These informant-perceived categories can then be compared to more traditional linguistic boundaries for further analysis.


Preston's five-point method

The Preston five-point method is a set of techniques developed by Preston for the study of perceptual dialectology in the 1980s. The specific measures composing the five-point method include: *''Draw-a-Map'': in this method, informants are given a blank or very simplified map of the region being studied, and are asked to draw borders identifying the locations where they believe different dialects exist. Computerized methods of interpretation can also be used to draw generalized maps to be generated from the responses. * ''Degree of Difference'': In this method, informants are asked to rate the similarity or difference of the language of two regions, often on a numerical scale. Preston's original methods use a scale of 1-4 (where 1=same, 2=a little different, 3=different, and 4=unintelligibly different). Such comparisons usually ask the informant to rank a neighboring region in comparison to the participant’s home region. *''Correct and Pleasant'': this method asks informants to rate regions according to how “correct” or “pleasant” the variants spoken there are, either on a numerical scale or in comparison to other regions. Although Preston mostly investigated measures of "correctness" or "pleasantness," other works may also investigate other subjective qualities, such as whether a language is "formal" or "casual", "polite" or "rude", "educated" or "uneducated." *''Dialect identification'': methods ask informants to listen to recorded speech samples from a given
dialect continuum A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varie ...
and attempt to identify the region the sample is from. *''Qualitative data'': in addition to the aforementioned methods of gathering data, researchers in perceptual dialectology also gather data by asking more open-ended interview questions about the subjects thoughts on language variants, speakers, and other topics of interest.


Topics in perceptual dialectology


Linguistic vs. folk judgments

One of the areas of perceptual dialectology is discerning linguistic and folk judgments. A study by Zoë Boughton investigates perceptual dialectology in northern
France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...
through an dialect identification task. Subjects were asked to identify the regional origin of a speaker after listening to a voice samples. The Pays de la Loire respondents (from Nancy and Rennes, respectively the northeastern and northwestern regions) were not especially successful at correctly identifying the regional origins of the voice samples, but were able to detect some differences between the Nancy and Rennes speakers. The results suggest two regional-perceptual axes: the "North/east" relating to regional or social accent divergence, while the "West/Centre/
Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
" is more related to standardness of accent and convergence. The usage of authentic speech samples for identification reveals how well subjects are able to actually perceive the differences between dialects according to their own folk beliefs.


Factors in deciding boundaries


Geography

People generally regard their own
dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...
as distinct from other quite similar ones. A study of
Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
ians reflected this tendency. People outside of the
New England New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the Can ...
area saw speech as having a single Bostonian accent, while Bostonians themselves perceived different dialect boundaries, with their own region being separate from the rest of the New England area. When 50 Bostonians were asked to draw perceived dialect boundaries and rate degrees of pleasantness and correctness to examine similarities and differences, they varied significantly, reflecting the difficulty of establishing distinct dialect boundaries when mapping isoglosses.


Social classes

Perceptual dialectology also concerns itself with social dialects as well as regional dialects. Social dialects are those associated with certain social classes or groups, rather than with a region. An example of this is
African American Vernacular English African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, ), also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term), is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urba ...
, to which is attributed lower
education Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty ...
,
ignorance Ignorance is a lack of knowledge and understanding. The word "ignorant" is an adjective that describes a person in the state of being unaware, or even cognitive dissonance and other cognitive relation, and can describe individuals who are unaware ...
, and
laziness Laziness (also known as indolence) is disinclination to activity or exertion despite having the ability to act or to exert oneself. It is often used as a pejorative; terms for a person seen to be lazy include "couch potato", "slacker", and "b ...
. In one study,
white White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no hue). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully reflect and scatter all the visible wavelengths of light. White o ...
college males were asked to imitate black male speech and vice versa. The findings concluded that white college males immediately understood what the researcher meant when he asked the white male subjects to "talk like a black man." When completing their assigned task, the white males had a ready-made
phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
, a set of
paralinguistic Paralanguage, also known as vocalics, is a component of meta-communication that may modify meaning, give nuanced meaning, or convey emotion, by using techniques such as prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. It is sometimes defined as relatin ...
features of pitch range,
rhythm Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular re ...
, and vocal quality, and a rich and detailed variety of roles and topics. Some of the roles the white male subjects portrayed included a
basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular court, compete with the primary objective of shooting a basketball (approximately in diameter) through the defender's h ...
player, a hip, cool person, and a street person. The topics included
dancing Dance is a performing art form consisting of sequences of movement, either improvised or purposefully selected. This movement has aesthetic and often symbolic value. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its reperto ...
,
violence Violence is the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy. Other definitions are also used, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened ...
, and
slavery Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
. Yet, the white males had an extremely limited number of morphological and syntactic devices and a small comically exaggerated lexicon (including ethnically stereotyped
lexemes A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken ...
).


Slang

Slang Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of particular in-g ...
can also be influential for non-linguists in determining where dialect boundaries are. Many of the labels in a dialect mapping task focused on slang terms when studying perceptual dialectology of English spoken in California.
University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...
students were asked to label a map of California according to subjects, particularly Southern Californians, used "
hella ''Hella'' is an American slang term that originated in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is used as an intensifying adverb such as in "hella bad" or "hella good" and was eventually added to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' in 2002. It is possibl ...
" to identify the Northern California region. "
Dude ''Dude'' is American slang for an individual, typically male. From the 1870s to the 1960s, dude primarily meant a male person who dressed in an extremely fashionable manner (a dandy) or a conspicuous citified person who was visiting a rural ...
" was also used to identify the
San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United State ...
region.


Pleasantness and correctness

Ratings of pleasantness and correctness of dialects vary between speakers of different dialects. Speakers with the Southern accent from
Memphis, Tennessee Memphis is a city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the seat of Shelby County in the southwest part of the state; it is situated along the Mississippi River. With a population of 633,104 at the 2020 U.S. census, Memphis is the second-mos ...
, rated other Southern regions as less correct than other regions, but no less pleasant. Surprisingly, they rated their own speech as least educated and pleasant. Speakers from Memphis were also much more aware of distinctions among dialects within the South, but were not aware of differences in other regions such as the
West West or Occident is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth. Etymology The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some ...
, lumping it as one largely "correct" area. There were also varying ratings of pleasantness and correctness among regions within the South. When English speakers from
Reno, Nevada Reno ( ) is a city in the northwest section of the U.S. state of Nevada, along the Nevada-California border, about north from Lake Tahoe, known as "The Biggest Little City in the World". Known for its casino and tourism industry, Reno is the ...
rated Southern English, they rated it as less correct and pleasant and most different from their own speech.


Historical perceptual dialectology

Historical perceptual dialectology allows linguists to examine how and why dialects in the past gained popularity. Linguists gain the chance to examine how the perceptual dialectology of certain dialects of languages have evolved over a given time. The principal scholar examining perceptual dialectology is Dennis Preston, and his methodology involves interview-based techniques. Applying the initial methodology used in the field of perceptual dialectology would be impossible when examining the dialects of the past. Historical perceptual dialectology must not be confused with
historical linguistics Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # ...
, which is concerned with changes in linguistic phenomena over time. Unlike historical linguistics, historical perceptual dialectology is used to contribute to the social understanding of language and is used to link dialect perceptions to
political Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that stud ...
and intellectual
history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...
. Historical perceptual dialectology also has the ability to date the emergence of dialects. Issues with historical perceptual dialectology include relying on the text of the
literate Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, hum ...
population of the past. Considering perceptual dialectology is interested in the perceptions of the common folk, relying on data from a social group of a population is not an accurate representation of the general population. Subjects should be taken from a large pool when using interview techniques such as Dennis Preston's. Another issue is having only a single case to examine. Alexander Maxwell, a scholar of historical perceptual dialectology, examined the emergence of the three dialects of Slovak and how the general population of Slovak speakers came to accept that three dialects of Slovak exist. Maxwell used articles written mostly by "amateur linguists and language planners." He was interested in seeing how Slovak perceptual dialectology had evolved over time to reach the consensus of the general population. Maxwell found that perceptions of dialects shifted with political shifts. Examining historical perceptual dialectology, evidence shows shifts in perceptions of dialects are directly correlated to historical shifts, whether political, intellectual, or
social Social organisms, including human(s), live collectively in interacting populations. This interaction is considered social whether they are aware of it or not, and whether the exchange is voluntary or not. Etymology The word "social" derives from ...
. These studies imply the need to study linguistics with respect to history.


Language attitude studies

In addition to studying how and where nonlinguistics identify dialects, perceptual dialectology also considers itself with what attributes nonlinguists assign to those dialects. When informants associate a particular language variety with a particular group, the presumed social attributes of the group are transferred to the dialect itself. That dialect is then associated with those attributes even when informants cannot correctly identify the source of the dialect. Thus, dialects can come to index certain perceived social attributes such as formality, politeness, friendliness, intelligence, snobbishness, and other traits. Individuals who use these variants can then gain the appearance of the social traits attributed to the dialect.


Implications

As a field that studies the intersection of linguistic science with
human behavior Human behavior is the potential and expressed capacity ( mentally, physically, and socially) of human individuals or groups to respond to internal and external stimuli throughout their life. Kagan, Jerome, Marc H. Bornstein, and Richard M. ...
and cultural differences, the study of perceptual dialectology also reveals information of interest to many fields outside of just linguistics, including
sociology Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...
, cultural anthropology, and other fields that study human thoughts and behavior. Perceptual dialectology also has greater implications for the general field of linguistics as a whole. While folk linguistic judgments are often examined in contrast to formal linguistic analyses, strongly held folk judgments can in turn affect people's performance of language. An understanding of perceptual dialectology is useful for understanding the ways in which people's opinions on language can influence their actual behavior, in areas such as language change and language attitude studies. Finally, the findings of perceptual dialectology can prove useful in applied fields such as language teaching, where knowledge of how subjects regard different languages or varieties can be vital for increasing successful outcomes.


References

{{reflist Sociolinguistics Dialectology