A dialect with 'great inner strength'? : the perception of nativeness in the Bergen speech community.

Abstract

This article presents the results of a listening experiment designed (1) to test whether or not 'natives' of a speech community (here, Bergen in Norway) can judge speakers of their dialect as 'native' or 'non-native' and (2) to test their perception of degrees of mixing of their own dialect with another (that of the so-called 'Stril' rural districts surrounding Bergen). The results indicate that while the perception of nativeness is not an all-or- nothing matter, Bergen is more 'perceptually focused' than many other urban speech communities. It is found that the most 'Bergenised' Stril voice on the test tape is rated as 'native' by most of the judges, suggesting that fluency in a second dialect is possible at a relatively late age (in this case, 16). In the perception of dialect mixing, it was found that morpho- lexical features combine with other features in a complex way to lead to a 'percept' of a voice sample: rather than the features from different levels always co-varying, a low use of morpho-lexical features from the rural dialect may be compensated for by a high use of other rural features. The converse is also possible, leading to similar overall percepts. Finally, a model of the judges' attribution process is suggested.

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