The relationship between views, perceptions and production in Helsinki Swedish
Keywords:
consonant lengthening in stressed V:C syllables, dropping of final -r, folk linguistics, Helsinki Swedish, language variation, vowel lengtheningAbstract
This article deals with the relationship between people’s views, perceptions and production regarding two language features in Helsinki Swedish. The features in focus are consonant lengthening in stressed V:C syllables (e.g. [ba:k:a], ’to bake’) and vowel
lengthening in combination with dropping of final -r in verbs in present tense and plural nouns (e.g. [ta:la:], ’I speak’). The purpose of the study is to examine to what extent folkdialectological interviews can be applied to illuminate people’s production of specific language features. The aim is also to study the variation of consonant lengthening in stressed V:C syllables and vowel lengthening in Helsinki Swedish and the relationship between people’s views, perceptions and production regarding these features. For the study, 40 informants from Helsinki and its surroundings took part in an interview and a
perception task.
The results show that people’s views and perceptions corresponded to their production at an individual level, but only among those informants who mentioned the features in the interview or the perception task. However, approximately half of the informants did not mention the features at all, although some of them produced the features themselves. This means that there was no correlation between variation in production and whether or not the informants had mental representations of the features.
In general, the study points out the value of using different methods, investigating different aspects of language variation and relating them to eachother in order to get a deeper understanding of the dynamics of language variation.
