As detailed in Section 5.4, a perception study was also conducted in order to determine how other Dutch speakers perceived Achterhoeks speakers. This part of the study refers to Research Question 3 (What is the sociolinguistic profile of the typical Achterhoeks speaker according to other Dutch speakers?). Survey respondents listened to a sentence read by an Achterhoeks or regional standard speaker, and then were required to rate the speaker on a number of dimensions in order to build a sociolinguistic profile.
This section analyses the results of the perception study in two parts. Firstly, an overall comparison of the perceptions of dialect and regional standard speakers is presented. This considers overall trends in how dialect and regional standard speakers are perceived, and can give an idea of the “typical” Achterhoeks speaker as compared to the regional standard, as observed by participants across the Netherlands. The second part looks more deeply at the impact each vowel may have had on speaker perception, and compares the sentences
198
individually. This leads to a judgment concerning which vowels have contributed the most to the overall perceptions of the dialect and of regional standard speakers, and whether there is a correlation between speaker perception here, and what it means to speak in dialect according to the participants in the sentence reading and picture task components of this research. There are three categories of speakers discussed: a regional standard speaker (RS), non-rural dialect speaker (NRD), and rural dialect speaker (RD).
6.6.1. Perceptions of Dialect Speakers vs. Regional Standard Speakers
Overall, regional standard speakers were more likely to be perceived as younger and from a town or a city. This correlates with the demographics of the survey participants: the younger participants were less likely to report being speakers of a dialect than the older speakers (see Section 5.4.2 for a breakdown of participant demographic information). In general, the dialect speakers were more likely to be rated as older and from a town or rural location (see Table 22), and participant judgments did not necessarily match their actual ages.
Perceived Location Perceived Age
Speaker Rural Town City 20-39 40-59 60+
Rural 61.05 33.67 5.28 16.17 43.33 40.63
Non-Rural 42.77 47.35 9.89 27.18 63.09 9.73
Standard 9.52 63.66 26.83 53.87 42.73 3.4
Table 22: Perceived age and location of dialect and regional standard speakers. The number shown is the average of the percentage of the total responses to the relevant questions (N=40).
Table 22 shows the percentages of the perceived locations and ages of the speakers. In
actuality, there was only one standard speaker (aged 35), who provided the voice for all of the standard sentences (of which there were four in total), and he was from a non-rural location.
Most other speakers were within the 40-59 age range (six in total), with one speaker in the 18-39 age range, and one in the 60+ age range. Four speakers were from rural locations, and four were from non-rural locations (not including the regional standard speaker). None of the speakers resided in a city (yet the regional standard speaker was perceived to be from a city 26.83% of the time).
199
Ladegaard (2001), in studies which examined perceptions of regional Standard Danish speakers, hypothesised that the respondents’ backgrounds would influence their perceptions of the speakers; it turned out that the subjects would identify the Standard speaker as coming from the nearest large urban area in their region, and would be more likely to nominate a speaker from their own region as sounding more standard. Ladegaard indeed found a strong correlation between participant background and speaker perception, and he states that “what is perceived as standard by people in one part of the country is likely to be perceived as regional and non-standard by people in other regions” (Ladegaard, 2001, p.35). The results from the present survey follow on from, and correlate with, Ladegaard’s earlier results. While this survey did not test respondents’ opinions about the exact origin of the speakers who they were asked to listen to (they were asked only to nominate an urban, rural or non-rural
location), it was also apparent here, as in the research conducted by Ladegaard, that the respondents’ own linguistic backgrounds did influence their perceptions of the speakers in the present study. As described in Section 5.4.1, respondents were asked to listen to a series of recordings, and rate each speaker on a number of attributes. Respondents who self-identified as being speakers of a Low Saxon dialect, or nominated a more specific subgroup of Low Saxon dialect by town (such as Winterswijks in the Achterhoek), gave more favourable ratings of the dialect speakers than did the Low Franconian or Standard speakers, rating the former more highly on the personal attributes of Friendliness, Intellect, Education and Trustworthiness, and the language attributes of Correctness and Pleasantness. For each sentence presented to them, this group showed a preference for the speaker who represented the more traditional dialect (for example, a dialect speaker over an RS speaker, or an RD speaker over an NRD speaker).
200
Figure 87: Attributes ratings (Mean). The result shown is the average of the percentage of the total responses to the relevant questions (N=40).
Survey respondents were separated by their own self-reported dialect in order to ascertain whether there was any link between their dialect and the perceptions they had of
Achterhoeks. The results show that in general, across all groups, the sentences read by the RS speaker scored slightly higher on Intellect and Education, but slightly lower on Friendliness and Trustworthiness. Figure 87 shows the ratings with respect to how self-identified speakers of Low Saxon, Low Franconian, and Standard varieties perceived dialect and non-dialect speakers in respect of these language attributes. The graph separates the RD, NRD and SD speakers by how each dialect group perceived the six characteristics. These results have been averaged from the results for each sentence, which are discussed separately in Section 6.7.2.
As Figure 87 shows, there appears to be a pattern between dialect and non-dialect speaking participants’ perceptions of the speaker attributes of Friendliness, Intellect, Education, and Trustworthiness. The results for all of these attributes tend to be slightly higher overall among the Low Saxon-dialect speaking participants. All of the dialect groups scored higher on Friendliness and Trustworthiness than they did on Intellect and Education, except for the RS speaker, whom the Low Franconian group rated lower for Friendliness. The Low
Franconian and Standard Dutch-speaking groups rated the latter two attributes of Intellect and Education more highly for the RS speaker than they did for either of the dialect speakers.