Charlotte Gooskens * and Wilbert Heeringa The role of dialect exposure in receptive multilingualism
نویسنده
چکیده
Previous investigations of inter-Scandinavian intelligibility have shown that, in general, Norwegians are better at understanding the closely related languages Danish and Swedish than Danes and Swedes are at understanding Norwegian. This asymmetry is often explained by the strong position that dialects hold in Norway as opposed to in Denmark and Sweden. In Norway, the general public is more exposed to language variation than in Sweden and Denmark. Due to this exposure Norwegians are assumed to have higher language awareness and more possibilities for linguistic transfer than Swedes and Danes. This could make it easier for them to understand closely related language varieties. The aim of the present investigation is to get an answer to the question whether Norwegians are better at understanding Nordic varieties relative to linguistic distances than Danes. If it is indeed the case that Norwegians have more language awareness, we would expect them to be better than Danes at understanding varieties with the same linguistic distance to their native variety. Our results show that Norwegians are generally better at understanding Nordic language varieties than Danes are. However, this can be explained by linguistic distances and knowledge of the language varieties in the test. No evidence was found for more general language awareness among Norwegians than among Danes.
منابع مشابه
The Relative Contribution of Pronunciation , Lexical and Prosodic Differences to the Perceived Distances between Norwegian Dialects . Charlotte
In the period between 1999 and 2002 Jørn Almberg and Kristian Skarbø compiled a database which consists of recordings and phonetic transcriptions of translations of the fable ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ in about 50 Norwegian dialects. On the basis of 15 of these recordings Charlotte Gooskens carried out a perception experiment (see Gooskens and Heeringa, 2004). In this experiment she investiga...
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In the period between 1999 and 2002, Jørn Almberg and Kristian Skarbø compiled a database which consists of recordings and phonetic transcriptions of translations of the fable ‘The North Wind and the Sun’ in about fifty Norwegian dialects. On the basis of fifteen of these recordings, Charlotte Gooskens carried out a perception experiment (Gooskens and Heeringa, 2004). In this experiment she inv...
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