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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 730

Part of Session 179: Mutual intelligibility of closely related languages in a multilingual Europe (Other abstracts in this session)

The effect of regular sound changes on word intelligibility in the Mainland Scandinavian languages

Authors: Kürschner, Sebastian
Submitted by: Kürschner, Sebastian (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany)

We study the effect of major sound changes on mutual word intelligibility between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Our focus is on sound changes dividing Danish from its northern neighbor languages, i.e., both vowel changes (the Great Mainland Scandinavian Vowel Shift, vowel lowering, and Danish a-shift) and consonant changes (Danish Consonant Shift, backing of /r/, and related phonological processes). With Danish stød, we also take a prosodic change into account.

The effect of all changes is studied based on data derived from an experiment on the intelligibility of 143 Scandinavian cognate nouns which were presented in isolation in spoken form. Subjects were asked to translate the given stimuli from a neighbor language into their mother tongue. Word intelligibility scores were measured in terms of the number of correct translations per word. The distribution of intelligibility scores of words affected by a given sound change was compared with the distribution of intelligibility scores of words unaffected by that change. Moreover, we studied the incorrect answers for given stimuli, identifying which of the sound correspondences caused specific problems.

In general, vowel and consonantal changes as well as stød are relevant to intelligibility. More specifically, we found that Danes had most problems recognizing words which were affected by the Great Vowel Shift. Additionally, the apical realization of /r/ in Norwegian and Swedish turned out to be problematic for Danish subjects. For Norwegians and Swedes, the most problematic changes were unshifted Danish vowels and the fronting of Danish /a/.

After a discussion of these findings, we present implications for Inter-Scandinavian language didactics, especially language teaching and training in inter-Scandinavian communication: When confronted with Scandinavian neighbor languages, knowledge about systematic sound relations might help to improve the recognition of cognates, especially when these relations were identified to cause problems frequently. Additionally, using orthographical knowledge can be useful with respect to specific sound relations, since the Scandinavian orthographies are rather conservative and do not reflect all the sound changes causing differences between the Mainland Scandinavian languages.