To appear in Charles Boberg, John Nerbonne, and Dominic Watt (eds), Handbook of Diaelctology, Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell
Perceptual Dialectology
Dennis R. Preston
Oklahoma State University
1.0 Introduction
Perceptual dialectology (PD) is the branch of folk linguistics that deals with regional
distribution from the point of view of nonspecialists (the “folk”), but has, almost from the
beginnings, attended to both social and attitudinal factors.
Interest in PD dates back to at least the 19th Century (Willems 1886) but was
extensively developed in the mid 20th, especially in The Netherlands and Japan (e.g.,
Daan 1970, Grootaers 1959, Mase 1964a,b, Sibata 1959, Weijnen 1946). A late 20th
Century revival has established it as a research technique often accompanying general
studies of variation or carried out independently for its own ethnographic value.
In this chapter the goals, methods, and findings of PD are summarized and
evaluated, focusing on the following questions:
1) Where do people believe speech differs?
2) Do PD boundaries differ from those offered by professionals?
3) What linguistic signals do people use to identify varieties?
4) In what ways do people believe speech differs?
5) Which variant linguistic facts influence comprehension?
6) What attitudinal factors trigger, accompany, and influence any of the above.
2.0 PD boundaries
2.1 The Netherlands and Japan
The first folk maps of language difference were probably those of Willems (1886; see
Goeman 1989 [1999]), who devised the “little arrow” method, an extension of which has
come to be known as the “degree-of-difference” method (Preston 1999a:xxxiv). In such
approaches respondents are asked where people speak similarly and/or differently. In the
first uses of the method, an arrow was drawn from the respondent’s site to each
surrounding site identified as “the same.” Figure 1 shows a map of part of the North
Brabant with dark thick lines indicating the professionally determined dialect regions.
Areas in the upper left of the figure illustrate the method. The respondent from W
(Willemstad) rates no nearby community as similar, and, therefore, no arrow is drawn
from W, and no surrounding communities identify W as similar, so no arrows are drawn
toward it. The respondent from D (Dinteloord), however, believes that F (Fijnaart) is the
same, and the respondent from F returns the favor, so arrows are drawn from D to F and
F to D. The F respondent also identifies K (Klundert) as the same, but the perception is
not reciprocal.
2
Figure 1. The westernmost section of the North Brabant, showing dialectologists’
boundaries (thick lines) and the ‘little arrows’ of respondent similarity perceptions
(enlarged from Weijnen 1946)
If there were a perfect match between perception and production, each pair of W-
D-F-K would be connected with two arrows. That is not the case, but there is a good
match, for, although not all the sites are connected to one another, no one identifies as
similar a site outside the production boundary, nor is any identified as similar by a
respondent from outside the boundary; moreover, in Figure 1 in general, the
interconnected bundles of arrows seldom cross the professional boundaries. These
findings in Dutch-speaking areas have been incorporated into more general maps of both
perceptual and production data. Goeman (1989 [1999:139]), for example, believes that
Van Genniken’s map of Dutch dialects (1913 [1928]) used some of Willems’ data, and
Daan in a general map (1970 [1999]) incorporated the same little arrow data that Weijnen
3
determined and Rensink (1955) used, although the latter was exclusively based on
perception. Other maps using the little arrow method include Kremer (1984 [1999], the
German-Netherlands border), Pearce (2009, northeast England), and Twilfer (2010,
Westphalia).
In the late 1950s a Dutch-Japanese controversy arose. In western Japan (Sibata
1959), respondents indicated which nearby villages were (1) not different, (2) a little
different, (3) quite different or (4) mostly incomprehensible, but (1) and (2), the bases for
the Dutch perceptual studies, were found to be of little value. Grootaers (1959) called
them “superfluous” (356), and the results of question 1) were ignored; questions (2) and
(3) were combined in one map (as in Figure 2), and question (4) was treated separately.
The Dutch maps were, therefore, ones of similarity and the Japanese ones of difference.
Figure 2. The determination of two PD areas in Itoigawa (Sibata 1959 [1999:42])
4
In Figure 2, the Japanese researchers indicate by increasingly thick lines (with
small bristle-like ones pointing back to the site of the response) those areas that formed
the difference boundaries. When respondents performed similarly in stating where the
differences were, they were grouped into subjective speech communities, outlined by the
saw-toothed lines. Both Sibata (1959) and Grootaers (1959, 1964) state that these
boundaries were of little interest since they did not correspond to professionally-
determined ones. The sites inside the two saw-toothed outlines (one on the left, a second
of the same area on the right) are different perceptual due to agreement about which
surrounding areas sound different. Weijnen (1968 [1999]) suggested that the failure to
discover parallels to production boundaries was the result of the Japanese reliance on
differences, which he claimed always existed to some degree.
Figure 3. Mase’s perceptual dialect areas for a section of Alpine Japan (1964a [1999:80])
5
Mase (1964a,b) asked respondents to indicate surrounding areas that sounded the
same or different but used both categorizations in devising his maps of Alpine Japan,
finding a good match between production and perception. His were the first to include a
mathematical calculation. Figure 3 shows his technique for areas #11-#26. He counted a
point for each site at which any respondent mentioned a “little difference.” He counted a
half-point if the respondent modified that a degree downward (e.g., a “very slight
difference”). He then calculated the number of points for all respondents in the region. If
they equaled two-thirds or more of the respondents, he considered the boundary major; if
they equaled more than one-third (but less than two-thirds), he considered it minor. In
Figure 3, 11.5 points were calculated for the boundary between #14-#15. Since 11.5 is
greater than two-thirds of sixteen (the total number of sites, i.e., #11-#26), #11 through
#14 are grouped into one major perceptual region, labeled (d), and #15-#26 are grouped
into a second, (e). Within those regions, however, seven points were given between #24-
#25, six between #25-#26, and five and a half between both #12-#13 and #19-#20. Figure
3 shows these minor divisions with dashed lines since their point totals equal more than
one-third but less than two-thirds of all judgments.
Although this calculation reduces the ability to distinguish regions identified on
the basis of similarity and those on the basis of difference (and their relative importance),
Mase’s treatment is more quantitatively sophisticated than his predecessors’. The
Itoigawa team drew thicker lines to indicate areas which were agreed on as different by a
larger number of respondents, but a numeric standard was apparently not used. There is
also no quantitative approach in the little-arrow technique, since only one connection
6
causes a site to be included in a perceptual area (but see Pearce 2009 for a quantitative
use of the little-arrow method).
It is odd in these traditions to find value assigned to PD only if the folk agree with
professionals. Misao Tôjô, a leading figure in modern Japanese dialectology, said that
work on regional speech should go forward only after local folk ideas about language
were determined (1954:11), and Daan (1970:27-29) suggested that cultural practices
(e.g., religious ones) could not only cause the perception of differences but also trigger
actual differences, implying the importance of PD to the actuation problem as well as
those of (social) embedding and evaluation (Weinreich et al., 1968).
2.2 Degree-of-difference
In a newer PD task known as “degree-of-difference,” the scale was considerably
expanded over the local area approach of the Dutch and Japanese. Preston (1993, 1996),
for example, asked respondents to rank US states as 1=same, 2=a little different,
3=different, and 4=unintelligibly different. Figure 4 shows the responses of southeastern
Michigan respondents to this task, in which the mean scores were divided into four
groups: 1.00—1.75, 1.76—2.50, 2.51—3.25, 3.26—4.00. Note that Figure 4 shows that
when Michigan raters evaluate degree of difference they perceive a large local area of
similarity (contrary to Weijnen’s prediction). The ratings of the South are also of interest;
a large South emerges as a ‘3’ (the same given the Northeast). Texas, Arkansas,
Oklahoma, and Missouri are rated along with obviously Southern states (e.g., Georgia
and South Carolina). But a ‘core’ South (Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) earns a
‘4.’ These ratings suggest that the Michigan raters are aware of a wide area of influence
7
of Southern speech, emanating from an unintelligibly different core, but in the similarly
rated Northeast there is no such ‘unintelligible’ core.
Figure 4. Southeastern Michigan (marked by a star) respondents’ rating of degree-of-
difference for the 50 US states (Preston 1996:318)
8
Figure 5. A multidimensional scaling of Madrid respondents’ evaluations of degree-of-
difference for 17 areas of Spain (1=Galicia, 2=Asturias, 3=Cantabria, 4=Basque Country,
5=Navarra, 6=Aragon, 7=Catalonia, 8=Castile-Leon, 9=Rioja, 10=Extramadura,
11=Madrid, 12=Castile-La Mancha, 13=Valencia, 14=Balearic Islands, 15=Andalusia,
16=Murcia, 17=Canary Islands) (Moreno and Moreno 2002:304)
In later degree-of-difference work, statistical procedures such as factor analyses
and multidimensional scaling produced alternative visual representations. Figure 5 shows
the results for Madrid respondents (with the same 1–4 assessment values) for 17 regions
of Spain. The two dimensions scaled here offer an opportunity for further interpretation
beyond the similarities and dissimilarities discovered in rankings. The authors interpret
Dimension #1 (the horizontal) as a multilingual one, in which “non-Spanish” areas — 1
(Galicia), 4 (Basque Country), 7 (Catalonia), 13 (Valencia), and 14 (Balearic Islands) —
form a cluster on the right. Dimension #2 (the vertical) appears to be one of dialect
distinctiveness; one set of the most distinctive dialects is at the top — (5 [Navarra], 10
[Extramadura], 16 [Murcia], 17 [Canary Islands]), another at the bottom — (9 [Rioja] and
15 [Andalusia]), although these latter two are widely separated on the 1st Dimension,
suggesting there is something more native-like about Rioja. The norms are the local area
— (11 [Madrid], closely linked to 12 Castille-La Mancha), both not far from another
group — (2, 3, 6, 8), which, since it is above 11 and 12 on Dimension 2, we must assume
9
is slightly more marked dialectally, perhaps, in the direction of the topmost group
(Moreno and Moreno 2002:303).
Such statistical treatment offers other opportunities that help realize the
sociolinguistic dimensions of PD. In this study, for example, the authors go on to
compare men and women, three age groups, and three educational levels. They note that
Dimension #1 (language) is more important in the classifications offered by male,
middle-aged, and university educated respondents, while Dimension #2 (dialect) is more
significant for women and youth. In some studies (e.g., Hartley 1999), the groups within
multidimensional scales were combined on the basis of such further statistical tests as K-
means clustering.
Another technique for uncovering the distinctiveness of regional varieties was
borrowed from cultural anthropology (Tamasi 2003), again focusing on states of the US.
She provided respondents with 50 state-named cards, and asked them to sort them into
piles of dialect similarity. The piles were subjected to hierarchical cluster analyses,
revealing the states most frequently grouped together. Tamasi then derives maps from
them, showing degrees of similarity for the clusters at 25%, 50%, and 70% levels. She
also considers the match between these groups and traditional dialect boundaries, but
since her work, like the work in the degree-of-difference task, used predetermined
nonlinguistic areas (states), the comparisons are not easy to draw. On the other hand, the
clear advantage to Tamasi’s method is that it allows an overall comparison of differences,
not one based on the respondent’s reckoning of difference from the home site. In Figure
4, for example, the states in the Northeast of the US are given the same degree of
10
difference as those in the South, but they are distinct from one another in the cluster
analysis derived from Tamasi’s pile-sorts shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Cluster analysis (at .25) of Georgia respondents’ completion of a similarity pile-
sort task (derived from Tamasi 2003, Figure 4.3, p. 66)
2.2 Listen for differences
In the above techniques, the respondents are given no voice samples on which to base
their judgments; more recent work has used such samples. In Preston (1996) a scrambled
but relatively evenly-spaced north-south continuum of nine middle-aged, college-
educated male voices was played for respondents from southeastern Michigan who were
asked to associate each with a site on the map shown in Figure 6. The samples contained
no lexical or grammatical features that were regionally diagnostic.
11
Figure 6. The nine home sites of the male voices (Preston 1996:322)
A cluster analysis (Figure 7) might suggest considerable success. The northernmost
voices (Coldwater and Saginaw) are linked first (i.e., joined with a “+” farthest to the
left), and they are the only two areas dialectologists would label “Inland North” (Labov et
al. 2006); this pair is then linked to South Bend, the next voice south, perhaps the only
voice in the professionally-determined “North Midland”; this group of three is then
linked to Muncie, the next voice to the south and solidly “Midland,” but then these
northern and midland four are linked to New Albany. In a professional dialect geography,
New Albany should first be linked to sites south of it (Bowling Green and Nashville), all
“South Midland” areas.
12
Figure 7. Cluster analysis of southern Michigan placement of nine voices on the map in
Figure 6
There is also a southern grouping, but the distance of its linkages from the left
shows that it is not as strong as the northern one. Nashville and Florence are first linked,
then tied to Bowling Green, although, as suggested above, dialectologists would probably
have first linked New Albany, Bowling Green, and Nashville and then those three to
Florence. The most striking fact for professionals, however, is that Dothan, the
southernmost voice, is not linked to the southern cluster of Bowling Green-Nashville-
Florence. That cluster is linked first to the large northern group before all are finally
linked to Dothan. Perhaps Dothan is phonetically so southern (it is the only /r/-less voice,
although variably) that all other southern varieties are linked to everything north before it
is included. Professional dialectologists could identify many Southern features (e.g., /ɑɪ/
monophthongization, /ɪ/-/ɛ/ conflation before nasals) in all the voices from New Albany
to Dothan, so the perceptual grouping tantalizing suggests which features are salient and
13
how very distinct the southernmost variety of US English is for nonlinguists; it also
displays in this case a much greater sensitivity among these Michigan respondents to
more nearby (Northern and Midland) areas than to more southern (South Midland and
Southern) ones.
Degree-of-difference has also been indirectly measured in a voice-stimulus
technique introduced in Montgomery (2007) called “starburst.” He asked respondents
from various sites in the north of England to identify voice samples from around the
country by marking on a map where they thought the voice was from. He then showed, in
a “starburst” diagram, the relationship of each folk placement to the actual site of the
sample voice. This technique does away with the forced choice linearity used in Preston
1996 (e.g., Figure 4) although it continues the focus on differences from the point of view
of a single area.
2.3 Draw-a-map
Another PD practice was borrowed from cultural geographers’ interests in respondent
hand-drawn maps (e.g., Gould and White 1972). The technique (called “draw-a-map) was
introduced in Preston (1982) and was followed by increasingly sophisticated means of
combining individual respondent maps into general ones. Figure 8 shows an individual
map and Figure 9 a map generalized from ones drawn by the same southeastern Michigan
respondents whose home site is indicated by the star in Figure 4.
14
Figure 8: A hand-drawn map of US dialect areas by a southeastern Michigan European-
American female, age 18 in 1984.
Figure 9. Computer-generalized regions from 147 southeastern Michigan hand-drawn
maps of US dialect areas (Preston 1996:305)
15
The map in Figure 9 was realized by arbitrarily cutting off regions not drawn by fifteen
percent or more of the respondents. The remainder were outlined with a light-pen onto a
light-sensitive pad, and the aggregated areas were built by asking the computer to identify
those pixels that were enclosed by the outlines at various levels of intensity. The map in
Figure 9 is based on fifty-percent agreement among the respondents.
This computational procedure was improved on by Long (1999) and can now be
realized in a variety of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping software that
allows for full-color and quantitatively precise representations of the hand-drawn data as
well as maps that contrast social subgroups of respondents. Individual maps, often
studied for their ethnographic content, and Pre-GIS generalizations have been obtained
from many areas, and selections representing the British Isles, Canada, France, French-
speaking Switzerland, Germany, Japan, North and South Korea, Quebec (Canada),
Turkey, the United States, and Wales can be found in Preston (ed., 1999) and Long and
Preston (eds, 2002) although there are many other examples covering an even wider
range of areas.
A how-to for the construction of GIS maps of perceptual areas is available in
Montgomery and Stoeckle (2013), and Figure 10 shows the perceptual area potential for
such maps.
16
Figure 10. A generalized perceptual map of English and Scottish dialects from the point
of view of three north of England sites (Montgomery and Stoeckle 2013:Map 25).
Each of 12 dialect areas is outlined in a “heat map” showing the intensity of respondent
agreement for the extent of the area. The procedure also allows comparison of maps
drawn by different social groups and for the comparison of perceptual maps with such
other facts as population density or, as shown in Figure 11, the correlation between the
perceptual mapping of an area in southwestern Germany and the Catholic-Protestant
areas of the same region.
17
Figure 11. A generalized perceptual map of Schopfheim respondent identification of the
local dialect area compared to Catholic and Protestant areas in the same region
(F=France, D=Germany, CH=Switzerland). (Montgomery and Stoeckle 2013:Map 16).
Because the “attribute tables” of GIS mapping software can contain any information
about respondent or area identity and because GIS software systems contain a wealth of
information about areas that can be overlaid on perceptual maps, the potential for more
sophisticated investigation of PD is greatly enhanced. For example, Figures 12 and 13
compare intensity maps for the areas labeled “twang” and “drawl” by respondents from
all over the US State of Texas.
18
Figure 12. Areas of Texas identified as having a “drawl” (Cukor-Avila et al. 2012:17)
Figure 13. Areas of Texas identified as having a “twang” (Cukor-Avila et al. 2012:17)
Although “drawl” and “twang” overlap in one area of the north of the State (the
“Panhandle”), drawling is much stronger on the southeast coast and very seldom
19
perceived as part of the southernmost border with Mexico. “Twang,” however is strong
across the entire north of the State. Other recent examples of this technique include Evans
(2011), Washington USA; Jeon (2012), Korea; Montgomery (2007, 2012), North of
England, and Stoeckle (2012), southwestern Germany. Many more are in progress.
3.0 PD with an attitude
The relationship of language attitudes to the perception of region was an early
consideration in PD, and the first map of regional attitudes appears to be Inoue (1977/8,
1978/9, and see Inoue 1999:149 [Figure 11.1]), based on the semantic differential and
matched-guise technique used in attitude studies in the social psychology of language.
Preston (1985), again borrowing from the cultural geographical tradition outlined in
Gould and White (1974), established a second method of mapping evaluative judgments
in PD, although Preston (1982) comments extensively on the evaluative commentary
Hawai’i respondents wrote on their hand-drawn maps (a technique more extensively
made use of in Hartley and Preston, 1999), and such comments were early indicators that
hand-drawn maps contained much more than the perception of linguistic differences
alone (as many of the respondent labels in Figure 8 clearly show).
Social psychological studies of attitude were, in fact, criticized in PD work.
Preston (1989) suggested that ratings of voices from various sites were interpreted as
responses to voices from those sites, but, in fact, most social psychological studies did
not determine if respondents could identify the home site of the voices presented for
evaluation, and the very few of those that did ask found that many identifications were
incorrect (e.g., Tucker and Lambert 1969) and Milroy and McClenaghan (1977).
20
A combination of several methods and the incorporation of the results from hand-
drawn map studies is illustrated in the following studies. Preston (1996) asked
respondents to rate the US states for language “correctness” and “pleasantness,”
attempting to short-cut the usual factor-analytic approach taken in social psychological
studies by instead directly accessing the commonly discovered constructs of “status” and
“solidarity” (e.g., numerous chapters in Ryan and Giles 1982). Figure 14 shows the
results for “correctness” and 15 that for “pleasantness” for the same southeastern
Michigan raters indicated above by the star in Figure 4.
Figure 14. Southeastern Michigan ratings of the 50 US states, New York City, and
Washington D.C. on a scale of 1 (least) to 10 (most) for language “correctness” (Preston
1996:312)
21
Figure 15. Southeastern Michigan ratings of the 50 US states, New York City, and
Washington D.C. on scale of 1 (least) to 10 (most) for language “pleasantness” (Preston
1996:316)
These Michigan raters think very highly of their own speech for status and rate Michigan
best; they also think of themselves as most pleasant, although they share this honor with
four other (noncontiguous) states. The entire South and the New York City-New Jersey
area fare worst for both “correctness” and “pleasantness.” This ranking sheds further light
on the quantitative results shown in Figure 9. Why would Michigan respondents most
frequently draw a US South (94%), then their home area (61%), and in third place, an
area focused on New York City-New Jersey (54%). Although the intensity of these hand-
drawn representations might at first seem to confirm the degree-of-difference ratings seen
in Figure 4, there are more than subtle differences. Why is the New York-New Jersey
area represented so much more frequently than most of nearby New England when both
areas have the same degree-of-difference rating (Figure 4)? The most correct (and
22
secondarily pleasant) site is Michigan and the least correct (and least pleasant) areas are
the New York City-New Jersey focal region and the entire US South. Are these regions
most salient because they are most similar and most different linguistically, or does their
linguistic salience emerge at least in part because of nonlinguistic stereotypes held about
the people and language of the regions themselves?
These simple ratings of “correct” and “pleasant,” although they exposed broad
patterns of preference, did not make good use of available methodologies. Preston
(1999b) combined techniques associated with the matched-guise technique of language
attitude studies and the results of previous hand-drawn map investigations. Southeastern
Michigan raters were presented with a simplified version of Figure 9, which displayed the
previously determined major US perceptual regions for similar respondents, a technique
that did away with the arbitrary use of states and two major urban areas. They were asked
to write down as many descriptors of the way people talked in these different regions, and
the following most frequently offered ones were used in the next step of the investigation.
slow — fast
polite — rude
snobbish — down-to-earth
educated — uneducated
normal — abnormal
smart — dumb
formal — casual
bad English — good English
friendly — unfriendly
23
nasal — not nasal
speaks with — without a drawl
speaks with — without a twang (Preston 1999b:363)
The map was then shown to another group of respondents from southeastern Michigan
who were asked to rate each of the regions shown in Figure 9 on six-point Likert scales
for the twelve locally provided attributes. Table 1 shows the results for areas 1 and 2 of
Figure 9 (the home area of the respondents and the US South), the areas most frequently
drawn by the respondents who carried out the hand-drawn map task.
Table 1. Ratings for speech in the North (Area 2 in Figure 9) and South (Area 1 in Figure
9) for twelve attributes (* indicates the only two adjacent scores that are significantly
different and ‡ indicates negative ratings.) (Preston 1999b:366)
24
These respondents rate the attributes associated with the English of their home
area on the “status” dimension above 4.00 and only a few at 4.00 and under. Those
attributes are exactly reversed in their ratings of the South and are lowest rated, as shown
in the crossover pattern in Figure 16. More importantly, however, this more detailed
study shows that these northern raters actually find southern speech superior on the
solidarity scales of “casual,” “friendly,” “down-to-earth,” and “polite.” This reveals a
linguistic insecurity that the simple state ranking studies of pleasant and correct did not:
Michiganders do not just have a less intense feeling about the “pleasantness” of their
speech; they actually find their speech lacking in the solidarity function when compared
to southern US English in terms of the respondent-elicited and more detailed categories
used in this study as opposed to the researcher-imposed dichotomous notions “pleasant”
and “correct.”
3.1 Talk about language variety
Even more complex experimental methods in attitude studies have arisen, but a brief
survey of them will be given in the final section; it will not do, however, to leave this
more general discussion of attitudes to language variety without mention of discourse. A
number of discourse, conversational, speech act, and other pragmatic tools have been
used to investigate what people say about language, but the trick has always been to
convert the structural-interactional interests of those analytic procedures into ones that
will be revealing with regard to the content of the discourse rather than its structure.1 One
problem has been that folk interaction on PD matters appears to be limited to a listing of
assertions: “People in Kinki speak funny Japanese.” Although such assertions may make
25
up a substantial portion of the metalinguistic discussion, topic handling, presuppositions,
and other discoursal, pragmatic facts have been shown to be valuable in determining
respondent attitudes to language variety (e.g., Preston 1994).
Since all of these methods cannot be demonstrated, this potential for revealing PD
in discourse can be illustrated by pointing out the possibility of extracting pragmatic
presuppositions, those related to lexical and structural triggers (e.g., Levinson 1983:181-
85). For example, “started” in “Bill started smoking” presupposes that there was a time in
the past when Bill did not smoke (e.g., Levinson 1983:182). Although “Bill didn’t flunk
Algebra” doesn’t presuppose that Bill flunked anything, “What Bill didn’t flunk was
Algebra” suggests he did (e.g., Levinson 1983:182-83). When discourses turn to
language, the search for such presuppositions may be rewarding.
In the following exchange, a Taiwanese fieldworker (C) discusses African
American English with an African American friend (D).
1 C: We uh - linguistics, in this field, uh - from the book I s- I mean, I saw
from the book that - many linguists quite interest in black English. So
could you tell me - a little bit about - your dialect?
2 D: Dialects.
3 C: Heh yeah
4 All: ((laugh))
[
5 D: Well, uh: - well - see the world’s getting smaller. There’s=
[ [
26
6 C: ((laughs)) I- I mea- do you have-
7 D: =not - even among all the ethnic groups we’re- we’re getting- getting
less and less of dialectual in- inFLUence. (.hhh) Uh I’m- happen - not to
be - from the South, …. . (Preston 1994:286-87)
Without an account of presuppositions, this discourse is difficult to interpret, particularly
5-7 D. The first clue lies in the presupposition(s) of “So could you tell me a little bit
about your dialect” (1 C). “Your dialect” presupposes the existence of “dialect(s)” and
that “you” are the speaker of one. D’s perception of these presuppositions leads to the
odd assertions in 5-7 D:
The world’s getting smaller.
We’re getting less and less of dialectual influence (i.e., there are fewer and fewer
dialects)
I happen not to be from the South.
“The world’s getting smaller” explains why there are fewer dialects (education, media,
mobility, etc…), but the assertion that there are fewer dialects, responds to C’s
presupposition that they exist (a definite description; e.g., Levinson 1983:181). More
subtly, D confirms C’s presupposition that dialects exist, but, for D, they exist only in
such areas as “the South.” D appears to suggest that if C had only been lucky enough to
interview a speaker from the South, he might have had his query about “your dialect”
answered.
27
How can D’s observation that he is not from the South be taken unless it related to
his response to C’s query about D’s dialect? Recall that Michiganders, D included, find
the South very salient as a regional speech area and that its salience is undoubtedly
related to its incorrectness (see Figures 9 and 14); i.e., it is “a dialect.”
Presuppositions may also explain why D “happens” not to be from the South.
Why does he not just say “I am not from the South”? “Happen” is an implicative verb\
(Levinson 1983:181) and presupposes “inadvertence,” “lack of planning,” or “by
chance.” D “happens” not to be from the South because it is only happenstance that C
picked on a respondent who was not from the South (and could therefore not respond to
his request for personal “dialect” information).
A great deal more on this conversation and various pragmatic approaches to its
content is provided in Preston (1994). Work on discourse, then, from many perspectives,
but surely from both formal and informal pragmatic ones, reveals not only what speakers
have said or asserted (the conscious) but also what they have associated, entailed, and
presupposed (the subconscious), and the growing interest in subconscious attitudinal
reactions is explored below.
4.0 The linguistic content of PD
In more recent approaches to PD (and the attitudes so intimately connected) linguistic
detail rather than the overall speech used in most social psychological work has surfaced.
Respondents are sensitive to specific features in varieties (e.g., Graff, Labov and Harris
1986; Purnell, Idsardi, and Baugh 1999), and sophistication from the speech sciences and
acoustic phonetics has played an important role, since phonological features are the most
28
frequently investigated.
Plichta and Preston (2005) selected a well-known southern US speech stereotype
(/ay/ monophthongization) and resynthesized a sample of guide so that it increased in
monophthongization in seven regular steps from a fully diphthongal form ([ɑɪ]) to a fully
monophthongal one ([aː]). The seven voice samples (one male and one female) were
played three times at each of the seven steps for a total of forty-two judgments. In each
case, the respondent was to assign the word to one of the nine sites shown in Figure 6.
The assigned site numbers were averaged to ascertain if degree of monophthongization
was perceived (by respondents from all over the US, N=96) as an increasingly southern
feature. Table 2 shows the results.
Table 2. Mean scores based on regional values assigned each step of the increasingly
monophthongized versions of /a/ (Plichta and Preston 2005:121)
Step Mean Region
1 Saginaw
1 2.85 2. Coldwater
2 3.17 3. South Bend
3 3.87 4. Muncie
4 4.89 5. New Albany
5 5.99 6. Bowling Green
6 6.58 7. Nashville
7 7.02 8. Florence
9. Dothan
29
An ANOVA post-hoc test shows that each of these mean scores is significantly different
from every other one, revealing considerable sensitivity to very minor phonetic changes
and very clearly showing an association between monophthongization and the
respondents’ regional perception of it.
Other studies of specific features have focused on local sensitivity to regional
norms. Labov (2001) reports on a study in which high school (HS) and college (Col)
students who were local Inland Northern speakers from Chicago, Illinois (Chi) and non-
locals of the same age groups from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Phi) and Birmingham,
Alabama (Bir) listened to the word socks, the phrase wear socks, and the sentence “You
had to wear socks, no sandals.”
Figure 17. Local and non-local respondent groups’ correct understandings of the item
socks as an isolated word, in a phrase, and in a sentence (Labov 2001:69).
30
The Chicagoans are involved in a change in which the vowel of socks (i.e., the American
English LOT vowel) is pronounced farther forward along the F2 dimension (in the
direction of TRAP).2 As Figure 17 shows, the younger (HS) locals outstrip all other
groups (even slightly older locals) in understandings the word in isolation and the short
phrase, but it also shows that even the young native speakers of this system fall below
forty percent correct on the isolated word test, an important fact for a dialectology that
involves perception as well as production.
Herold (1990) records another interesting mismatch between production and
perception in a study in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, an area where the THOUGHT and LOT
vowels are merging. In Figure 18 we see that the production change is mirrored in
perception for the girls over a eleven-year period, but in the same time period the boys
have significantly changed their perception in keeping with the emerging local norm, but
not their production.
31
Figure 18. Change over time in girls’ and boys’ production and perception of the merger
of the THOUGHT/LOT vowels (Herold 1990).
More complex studies of local versus nonlocal detection and comprehension of
individual linguistic items have been carried out. In Rakerd and Plichta (2003), for
example, seven step resynthesized versions of the LOT vowel fronted along the F2
dimension (the items hot and sock) were played for southeastern Michigan respondents.
In some cases, carrier phrases with the same or other vowels from the local system (i.e.,
fronted LOT, raised and fronted TRAP, and lowered DRESS) preceded the items to be
judged; in other cases carrier phrases with unshifted vowels were used. When the local
system carrier phrases appeared (regardless of the specific items they included) the
respondents continued to recognize the test item as hot/sock in much more fronted
position that when the carrier phrases were not local, under which condition they changed
their interpretation to hat/sack at an earlier point in the F2 fronting). It is a long-standing
idea in the study of variety perception that hearers adjust their classificatory strategies to
the perception of system provided in input (Ladefoged and Broadbent 1957), and that is
surely an important consideration in cataloging the general facts about variety, at least if
such a catalog includes perception.
5.0 Putting it all together: PD, attitude, and the linguistic facts
Experimental PD took its most important turn in the work of Niedzielski (1999). She
asked forty-two southeastern Michigan respondents to listen to a recorded voice (the local
identity of which was indicated); they were told to concentrate on the vowel they heard in
particular words and to compare that vowel to a set of three resynthesized vowels (from
32
the same speaker’s data). They were then asked to choose the one that best matched the
original.
The speaker was influenced by the Northern Cities Shift (described above), and
the F1 for her /æ/ (TRAP) is at about 700 Hz; the norm for female speakers of American
English (according to Peterson and Barney 1952:183) should be considerably lower,
around 860 Hz. Niedzielski examined the respondents’ classification of the word “last.”
The formant frequencies for the three resynthesized tokens that the respondents were
given to choose from in the matching task are shown in Table 3.
Table 3. Formant values of tokens offered to respondents to match with the vowel in the
speaker’s pronunciation of “last” (Niedzielski 1999:74)
Token # F1 F2 label
1 900 1530 hyper-standard
2 775 1700 canonical
3 700 1900 actual token
The results of this matching experiment are shown in Table 4.
Table 4. Respondent matching results for the vowel in “last” (adapted from Niedzielski
1999:72)
token 1 2 3
hyper canonical actual
standard /æ/ token Total
33
10% 90% 0%
n= 4 38 0 42
Not one of the respondents chose token #3, the variant that matched the one first
produced by the speaker. Instead, they overwhelmingly chose the lower, more central
token, #2. A few respondents even chose the hyper-standard token.
This work shows a considerable mismatch between perception and acoustic
reality. The respondents reported that they heard a Michigan speaker (importantly
identified as one) use the canonical forms of the vowel rather than the shifted ones. Why
are these respondents so inaccurate in this task?
When these respondents are presented with data from a speaker who they think is
a fellow Michigander, the stereotype of Michigan English as standard emerges (see
above). As a result of this folk stereotype, the respondent selects the “standard” vowel.
The linguistically secure can alter their perceptual and even production systems easily
since they cannot conceive that their own performance would stray from the standard
(i.e., their norms). Michiganders are so linguistically secure that they acoustically
recalibrate the vowels of those around them and avoid notice of change or difference.
Attitudinal factors, however, can also be shown to interact with regional and
social features simultaneously. Table 2 showed the relative success of US respondents in
identifying the North-South location (Figure 6) of seven degrees of /ɑɪ/
monophthongization (a southern US speech caricature). The more monophthongal, the
more southern the identification. That study (Plichta and Preston 2005), however,
34
provided both male and female (resynthesized) samples of the word guide. Figure 19
shows the mean score assignments separated by sex of speaker.
Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5 Step 6 Step 70
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
2.39 2.653.25
4.01
5.45.99
6.43
3.31 3.694.5
5.776.59
7.167.61
FemaleMale
Mea
n ar
ea a
ssig
nmen
ts
Figure 19. Assignment of seven-step monophthongized male and female samples of
guide to the nine sites of Figure 6 (Plichta and Preston 2005:121)
Since the degree of monophthongization for the male and female voices were exactly
equal (through resynthesis), why would women’s voice be consistently identified as
“more northern” (or men’s as “more southern”) (as determined by independent t-tests)?
The full answer lies not just in the perception of region (/ɑɪ/ monophthongization is
southern), perception of degree (more monophthongization is more southern), but also
social (women are more northern/men more southern with equal degrees of
monophthongization). Attitudes to region very clearly cut across the
35
regional/perceptual/social nature of this task. It is a sociolinguistic commonplace that
women are more standard speakers than men (e.g., Trudgill 1972). It is an equally strong
stenotype that English in the South of the US is (perhaps along with the New York City-
New Jersey area) is the least correct English in the country.
5.1 Conscious and unconscious
The experimental work outlined above will surely lead the up-to-date reader to ask if
newer techniques in the exploration of attitudes that purport to elicit unconscious
attitudes to variety are being undertaken. Indeed they are, and they involve not only the
time-honored matched guise mode but also reaction-timed techniques (including so-
called implicit or “IRT” tests), eye-tracking measures, and even neurological responses.
One sample will have to suffice. Koops, Gentry, and Pantos (2008) reveals implicit
knowledge of the correlation between variation and age, using photographic priming and
eye-tracking. In Houston, Texas, older Anglo speakers merge high front lax vowels
before nasals; however, these vowels are not merged in younger Anglos. Direct measures
of language attitudes do not reveal knowledge of this variation; however, Koops et al.
shows results that suggest that respondents are in fact implicitly aware of this variation.
When primed with a photo of an older speaker, respondents fixate longer on words that
are homophonous (e.g., rinse versus rents) in the merged (but not the unmerged) dialect.4
This conscious-unconscious split in PD studies is an important one since in a
recent proposal Kristiansen (2009) finds that Danes from all over Denmark say that they
like their home variety best, but that, when a carefully constructed matched-guise test is
given, they prefer the emerging “New Copenhagen” standard, the forms of which are
36
influencing the entire country. If matched guise is an actually unconscious (or implicit)
method of collection (but see Preston 2009) and if the generalization reached about this
dichotomy for Denmark is found in other areas, these different methods of investigation
will prove essential to PD and dialectology in general, perhaps particularly in those
places where standardized or more widespread forms are replacing local ones.
6.0 Conclusion
By now readers will have realized that the term perception in this chapter has referred to
two different things. On the one hand, it refers to the ideas that respondents have about
the facts around them that surface in such tasks as drawing dialect boundaries on a blank
map or assigning attributes to a variety’s speech. On the other, it refers to the perceptual
abilities respondents have not only in recognizing variety differences but also in detecting
subtle differences in specific linguistic markers of variety. The term variety has also
appeared with greater frequency after the almost exclusively regional considerations of
the first section, but the first sentence of the introduction notes that sociolinguistic factors
were from early on a consideration of most work in PD, in keeping with Chambers and
Trudgill, who declare that “[d]ialectology without sociolinguistics at its core is a relic”
(1998:188), and this chapter has illustrated the importance of social groups in PD (in both
senses of perception).
Finally, however, the role of attitude has been shown to cut across both these
concerns. Respondents delineate areas as distinct or different on the basis of their likes
and dislikes of speakers and the stereotypes they hold of them, giving concrete expression
to Silverstein’s notion of higher-order indexicality in which the attributes of people (slow,
37
smart, fun-loving) are assigned to their language variety and, in fact, become intrinsic
parts of that variety’s description (2003). Respondents hear (and refuse) to hear the
linguistic details of variety based on those same attitudes, adding another dimension to
the second definition of perception.
Just as Chambers and Trudgill claim that dialectology without sociolinguistics is a
relic, I believe the work in PD over the years has shown that dialectology without PD is
half the story. The study of what people identify (in both regional and social senses),
hear, think they hear, process, comprehend, and hold attitudes towards is a necessary part
of the scientific investigation of variety.
Notes
1 Critical discourse analysts have found it easy to make this jump; not everyone
agrees (e.g., Widdowson 1998).
2 This is the repositioning of vowels in the Inland North of the US known as the
“Northern Cities Shift” (Labov et al. 2006).
3 Preston (2010) shows similar bad performances on the comprehension of single-
word tokens in isolation for southeastern Michiganders, who are involved in the same
Northern Cities Shift.
4 Preston and Niedzielski (2013) review a number of these recent studies. Two
anthologies, Prikhodkine and Preston (forthcoming) and Babel (forthcoming), focus on
the unconscious-conscious split in attitude studies.
38
References
Babel, Anna (ed.), Awareness & control in sociolinguistic research. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Chambers, J. K. and Peter Trudgill. 1998. Dialectology (2nd ed.)
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cukor-Avila, Patricia, Lisa Jeon, Patricia Rector, Chetan Tiwari, and Zak
Shelton. 2012. Texas — It's like a whole nuther country: Mapping
Texans' perceptions of dialect variation in the lone star state.”
Texas Linguistics Forum 56. Proceedings from the Twentieth
Annual Symposium About Language and Society — Austin
(SALSA XX). University of Texas at Austin, 10-19.
Daan, Jo. 1970 [1999]. Dialekten. In Jo Daan and D.P. Blok, Van randstad tot landrand
(Bijdragen en Mededelingen der Dialectencommissie van de Koninklijke
Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam XXXVII), 7-43.
(Translated as “Dialects” in Preston (ed.), 1999, 9-30.)
Evans, Betsy E. 2011. Seattletonian to faux hick: Perceptions of English in
Washington State. American Speech, 86:4:383-413.
Ginneken, Jac. van. 1913 [1928]. Handboek der Nederlandsche taal. ‘s Hertogenbosch:
L.C.G. Malmberg.
Goeman, A. C. M. 1989 [1999]. Dialectes et Jugements Subjectifs des Locuteurs:
Quelques Remarque de Méthode a Propos D’une Controverse. In Espaces
Romans (études des dialectologie et de géolinguistique offertes à Gaston
Tuaillon, Vol. II), Université Stendhal — Grenoble 3: Ellug, 532-44. (Translated
39
as “Dialects and the subjective judgments of speakers: Remarks on controversial
methods” in Preston (ed.) 1999, 135-44.)
Graff, David, William Labov, and Wendell Harris. 1986. Testing listeners’ reactions to
phonological markers of ethnic identity: A new method for sociolinguistic
research. In David Sankoff, ed., Diversity and diachrony.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 45-58.
Grootaers, Willem A. 1959. Origin and nature of the subjective boundaries of dialects.
Orbis 8:355-84.
Grootaers, Willem A. 1964 [1999]. La discussion autor des frontières dialectales
subjectives. Orbis 13:380-98 (Translated as “The discussion surrounding the
subjective boundaries of dialects,” in Preston (ed.), 1999, 115-29).
Gould Peter and Rodney White. 1974. Mental maps. New York & Baltimore: Penguin
Books.
Hansen, Sandra, Christian Schwarz, Phillip Stoeckle, and Tobias Streck (eds).
Dialectological and folk dialectological concepts of space: Current methods and
perspectives in sociolinguistic research on dialect change. (linguae & litterae:
Publications of the School of Language & Literature, Freiburg Institute for
Advanced Studies 17). Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Hartley, Laura C. 1999 A view from the west: Perceptions of U.S. dialects by Oregon
residents. In Preston (ed.), 1999, 315-332.
Hartley, Laura C. and Dennis R. Preston. 1999. The names of US English: Valley girl,
cowboy, Yankee, normal, nasal, & ignorant. Tony Bex & Richard J. Watts (eds).
Standard English. London: Routledge, 207-38.
40
Inoue, Fumio. 1977/8. Hôgen Imêji no Tahenryô Kaiseki [Multi-variate analysis of
dialect image] (part 1). Gengo Seikatsu 311:82-91.
Inoue. Fumio. 1978/9. Hôgen Imêji no Tahenryô Kaiseki [Multi-variate analysis of
dialect image] (part 2). Gengo Seikatsu 312:82-88.
Inoue, Fumio. 1999. Classification of dialects by Image: English and Japanese. In Preston
(ed.), 1999, 147-159.
Jeon, Lisa. 2012. Drawing boundaries and revealing language attitudes:
Mapping perceptions of dialects in Korea. Unpublished MA Thesis,
University of North Texas.
Kremer, Ludger. 1984 (1999). Die niederländisch-deutsche Staatgrenze als subjektive
Dialektgrenze. In Grenzen en grensproblemen. Een bundel studies uitgegeven
door het Nedersaksisch Instituut van de R. U. Groningen ter gelegenheid van zijn
30-jarig bestaan. (=Nedersaksische Studies 7; zugleich: Driemaandelikse Bladen
36), 76-83. (Translated as “The Netherlands-German border as a subjective
dialect boundary,” in Preston (ed.), 1999, 31-36.)
Kristiansen, Tore. 2009. The macro-level meanings of late-modern Danish accents. Acta
Linguistica Hafniensia 41:167-192.
Labov, William. 2001. Principles of linguistic change, Volume 3: Cognitive and cultural
factors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American
English. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ladefoged, Peter and D. E Broadbent. 1957. Information conveyed by vowels. Journal of
the Acoustical Society of America, 1(29), 99-104.
41
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Long, Daniel. 1990. Hôgen ninchi chizu no kakikata to yomikata (The drawing and
reading of perceptual dialectology maps). Proceedings of the Dialectological
Circle of Japan 50:7-16.
Long, Daniel and Dennis R. Preston. 2002. Handbook of perceptual dialectology, Volume
2. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Mase, Yoshio. 1964a [1999] Hôgen ishiki to hôgen kukaku. In Misao Tôjô (ed.), Nihon
hôgen kenkyûkai, 270-302. Tokyo: Tokyodo (Translated as “Dialect
consciousness and dialect divisions,” in Preston (ed.), 1999, 71-99).
Mase, Yoshio. 1964b (1999). Hôgen ishiki ni tsuite: Washa no genkyûshita hôgenteki
tokuchô. Nagano-ken Tanki Daigaku Kiyô [Collected Papers of the Nagano
Junior College] 18:1-12 (Translated as “On dialect consciousness: Dialect
characteristics given by speakers,” in Preston (ed.), 1999, 101-13).
Milroy, Lesley and P. McClenaghan. 1977. Stereotyped reactions to four educated
accents in Ulster. Belfast Working Papers in Language and Linguistics 2,4:1-11.
Montgomery, Christopher. 2007. Northern English dialects: A perceptual approach.
Ph.D. dissertation. University of Sheffield.
Montgomery, Christopher. 2012. Mapping the perception of non-linguists in Northern
England. In Hansen et al. (eds), 164-178).
Montgomery, Christopher and Phillip Stoeckle. 2013. Geographic information systems
and perceptual dialectology: a method for processing draw-a-map data. Journal of
Linguistic Geography 1,1:52-85.
42
Niedzielski, Nancy. 1999. The effect of social information on the perception of
sociolinguistic variables. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18.1:62-85.
Peterson, Gordon E. and Harold L. Barney. 1952. Control (CAPS) methods used in a
study of the vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 24,2:175-84.
Plichta, Bartłomiej and Dennis R. Preston. 2005. The /ay/s Have It: The perception of
/ay/ as a north-south stereotype in United States English. In: Acta Linguistica
Hafniensia 37 (Tore Kristiansen, Peter Garrett, and Nikolas Coupland (eds).
Subjective Processes in Language Variation and Change): 107-30.
Preston, Dennis R. 1982. Perceptual dialectology: Mental maps of United States dialects
from a Hawaiian perspective. In Dennis R. Preston (ed.), University of Hawaii
working Papers in Linguistics 14,2:5-49.
Preston, Dennis R. 1985. Southern Indiana perceptions of “correct” and “pleasant”
speech. In Henry Warkentyne (ed.), Methods/Méthodes V (Papers from the Fifth
International Conference on Methods in Dialectology). Department of Linguistics,
University of Victoria, British Columbia, 387-411.
Preston, Dennis R. 1993. Folk dialectology. In Dennis R. Preston (ed.), American dialect
research. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 333-377.
Preston, Dennis R. 1994. Content-oriented discourse analysis and folk linguistics.
Language Sciences 16,2:285-330.
Preston, Dennis R. 1996. Where the worst English is spoken. In Edgar Schneider (ed.),
Focus on the USA. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 297-360.
Preston, Dennis R. 1999a. Introduction. In Preston (ed.), 1999, xxiii-xl.
43
Preston, Dennis R., 1999b. A language attitude approach to the perception of regional
variety. In Preston (ed.), 1999, 359-73.
Preston, Dennis R. (ed.). 1999. Handbook of perceptual dialectology: Volume 1,
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Preston, Dennis R. 2009. Are you really smart (or stupid or cute, or ugly, or cool)? Or do
you just talk that way? Marie Maegaard, Frans Gregerson, Pia Quist, & Jens N.
Jørgensen (eds), Language attitudes, standardization & language change —
perspectives on themes raised by Tore Kristiansen on the occasion of his 60th
birthday. Oslo: Novus Forlag, 105-29.
Preston, Dennis R. 2010. Belle’s body just caught the fit gnat. In Dennis R. Preston and
Nancy Niedzielski (eds), A reader in sociophonetics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton,
241-252.
Preston, Dennis R. and Bartłomiej Plichta. 2005. The /ay/s have it. In Tore Kristiansen,
Nik Coupland & Peter Garrett (eds). Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 2005
(Subjective processes in language variation & change), 107-30.
Preston, Dennis R. and Nancy Niedzielski. 2013. Approaches to the study of language
regard. In Tore Kristiansen and Stefan Grondelaers (eds), Language
(de)standardisation in Late Modern Europe: Experimental studies. Oslo: Novus,
287-307.
Prikhodkine, Alexei and Dennis R. Preston (eds). Language attitudes: Variation,
processes, & outcomes. John Benjamins: Amsterdam.
Rakerd, Brad and Plichta, Bartłomiej. (2003). More on perceptions of /a/ fronting. Paper
presented at NWAV 32, University of Pennsylvania.
44
Rensink, W. G. 1955. Dialektindeling naar opgaven van medewerkers. Amsterdam
Dialectbureau Bulletin #7:20-23 (=Mededelingen der Centrale commissie voor
Onderzoek van het Nederlandse Volkseigen no. 7). (Translated as “Informant
classification of dialects,” in Preston (ed.), 1999, 3-7.)
Ryan, Ellen Bouchard and Hoard Giles (eds). 1982. Attitudes towards language
variation: Social and applied contexts (The Social Psychology of Language 1).
London: Edward Arnold.
Sibata, Takesi. 1959. Hôgen Kyôkai no Ishiki. Gengo Kenkyû 36:1-30. (Translated as
“Consciousness of dialect boundaries” in Preston (ed.), 1999, 39-62).
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life.
Language & Communication 23:193–229.
Stoeckle, Phillip. 2012. The folk linguistic construction of local dialect areas — linguistic
and extra-linguistic factors. In Hansen et al. (eds), 142-163.
Tamasi, Susan L. 2003 Cognitive patterns of linguistic perceptions. Unpublished PhD
dissertation, University of Georgia.
Tôjô, Misao. 1953. Nihon Hôgengaku [Japanese Dialectology]. Tokyo:
Yoshikawakobunkan.
Trudgill, Peter. 1972. Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the urban British
English of Norwich. Language in Society 1,2:179-195.
Tucker, G. Richard and Wallace E. Lambert. 1969. White and Negro listeners’ reactions
to various American-English dialects. Social Forces 47:463-468.
45
Twilfer, Daniela. 2010. Dialektgrenzen im Kopf: Der westfälische Sprachraum aus
volkslinguistischer Perspektive (Westfälische Beiträge zur niederdeutschen
Philologie 13). Gütersloh: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte.
Weijnen, Antonius A. 1946. De grenzen tussen de Oost-Noordbrabantse dialecten
onderling. In Antonius A. Weijnen, J. M. Renders, and Jac. van Ginneken (eds),
Oost-Noordbrabantse dialectproblemen. Bijdragen en Mededelingen der
Dialectencommissie van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van
Wettenschappen te Amsterdam 8, 1-15.
Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov, and Marvin I. Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for
a theory of linguistic change. In W. F. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel (eds), Directions
for historical linguistics. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 95-188.
Widdowson, Henry. 1998. The theory and practice of critical discourse
analysis (review article). Applied Linguistics 19,1:136-51.
Willems, P. 1886. De enquête werd gehouden in 1886 de antwoorden zijnhet eigendom
ca de Koninklijke Vlaamsche Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde, en worden
daar bewaard [The enquiry was done in 1886; the responses are the property of
the Royal Flemish Academy of Languages and Literatures in Ghent where they
are preserved]. Microcopies are at the institutes of Dialectology and Phonetics in
Leuven, the Catholic University Nijmegen, and the P. J. Meertens Institute,
Amsterdam.
Woolard, Kathryn A. 1998. Introduction: Language ideology as a field of enquiry. In
Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity (eds), Language
ideology: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 3-47.
46