Tomé Lourido, G orcid.org/0000-0002-3456-7334 and Evans, BG (2021) Sociolinguistic Awareness in Galician Bilinguals: Evidence from an Accent Identification Task. Languages, 6 (1). 53. p. 53. ISSN 2226-471X
Abstract
The inclusion of European minority languages in public spaces such as education, administration and the media has led to the emergence of a new profile of speakers, “new speakers”, who typically acquire a minority language through education, but vary in terms of their language experience and use. The present study investigated whether a distinctive variety spoken by Galician new speakers (neofalantes) has emerged in the community and whether listeners’ language background influences accent identification abilities and patterns. Galician-Spanish bilingual listeners completed an accent identification task and were asked to comment on factors influencing their decision. Results demonstrated that all listeners could identify Galician-dominant better than Spanish-dominant bilinguals but could not identify neofalantes. Neofalantes were categorised as both Spanish- and Galician-dominant, supporting the idea that neofalantes have a hybrid variety. This finding suggests that listeners have a gradient representation of language background variation, with Galician-like and Spanish-like accents functioning as anchors and the neofalantes’ accent situated somewhere in the middle. Identification accuracy was similar for all listeners but neofalantes showed heightened sensitivity to the Galician-dominant variety, suggesting that evaluation of sociophonetic features depends on the listener’s language and social background. These findings contribute to our understanding of sociolinguistic awareness in bilingual contexts.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | new speakers; accent identification; sociolinguistic awareness; bilingual speech processing; Galician phonetics; minority languages |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Languages Cultures & Societies (Leeds) > Linguistics & Phonetics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 22 Mar 2021 11:27 |
Last Modified: | 22 Mar 2021 11:27 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | MDPI |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/languages6010053 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:172353 |