14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Imitation Of Dialects: From South Swedish to West Swedish

My Segerup

Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Sweden

Imitating a dialect involves changing the prosody and pronunciation of the source dialect. Investigations show that the imitator is not bound to imitate every characteristic feature of the target dialect in order to produce a successful imitation since some features are more highly ranked than others. This study reports on imitations of the West Swedish dialect performed by native speakers of the South Swedish dialect. As an alternative approach the imitations teach us more about the most characteristic features of the target dialect and further guide us to the essence of the dialect. The identity of a dialect is considered to be within the realisation of the focal gesture and accordingly this feature is part of the essence of the West Swedish dialect. The results of the study also show that the vowel quantity is another feature of the essence of the West Swedish dialect.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Segerup, My (1999): "Imitation of dialects: from South Swedish to West Swedish", In ICPhS-14, 1253-1256.