Modifications of Pilot Study

The next stage of this study was modified from the pilot study, particularly in respect of the measurement and presentation of data. Although it is discussed in more detail in the relevant sections below, it is helpful to summarise these changes concisely here:

1. Regarding the study design, female participants, as well as male ones, were involved, and a picture task was added as well as the inclusion of more sentences to be translated into dialect, with the addition of sentences testing participants’ pronunciation of the HUIS vowel (see below). Results were included only from participants who stated that they spoke

Achterhoeks, therefore data such as that of M35 from the pilot study were not included in the final results. This speaker was, however, interviewed again, and his speech was used as a comparison to dialect in the later perception study conducted in 2016.

2. While the F1/F2 formants of monophthongs were only measured at the temporal mid-point throughout the pilot study (see Section 4.1), during the main stage they were measured at both points 2 and 8 to account for any slight diphthongisation that the vowel might be undergoing, or to confirm the monophthongal attributes of the vowel. This ensures greater accuracy of measurements compared to selecting just the midpoint of the vowel or averaging the measurements. Point 2 of the measurements was then used in analysis of monophthongal vowels.

3. Additionally, the formant data were normalised. This was to account for the fact that the new 2015 data included a broader age range, as well as both male and female speakers.

Without normalisation, these speakers could not be directly compared to each other and the earlier recordings (which were comprised solely of participants who would be considered to be NORMs³⁶ (Chambers and Trudgill, 1980) under a UK classification system of speakers).

A brief description of how the normalisation procedure (“Lobanov”) was selected is included in Section 5.3.1.

4. The other major modification made was in the presentation of the data. Normalised

formant charts were created using NORM (Thomas and Kendall, 2007) in order to display the

36Non-mobile, Older, Rural, Male.

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results, as they are more visually useful and consistent when analysing data. Additionally, scatter plots were created in the programme R, and box plots in SPSS, both of which were helpful in establishing and visualising trends and stability across the data.

The sentences were written in Standard Dutch, and participants were required to translate them into their dialect; they were not presented with sentences written in the orthography of the Achterhoek. The sentences presented to participants to read in their dialect included the original sentences also used in the pilot study, along with the following additions (all designed and used originally by Weijnen and Van Prooije in 1979):

● Met veel geweld kwam hij aanrijden (‘With great force he came riding’)

● De jongens waren tegen de populierenstam aan het slaan (‘The boys were beating against the poplar tree’)

● Ik zal deze bezem meenemen gaarne (‘I will gladly take this broom’)

● De koe had grote horens (‘The cow had big horns’)

● De buren zetten bij de trouwerij een boog om de deur (‘The neighbours put a bow on the door at the wedding’)

● In de keuken staat een oventje (‘In the kitchen is an oven’)

● De kogel raakte de kraai die op draad zat (‘The bullet hit the crow that sat on the wire’)

● Ik heb dat ding daar nodig (‘I need that thing there’)

● We eten kaas (‘We are eating cheese’)

● Hij had een blaar aan zijn voet (‘He had a blister on his foot’)

● Hij liep tegen paaltje aan (‘He ran into the pole’)

● Moeder deed de gordijnen dicht (‘Mother closed the curtains’)

● ‘s morgens vroeg opstaan kost moeite (‘It takes effort getting up early in the mornings’)

● Hij is een huis aan het zoeken (‘He is searching for a house’)

● De dominee loerde naar buiten (‘The vicar peered outside’)

● Het jongetje wilde onder de auto kruipen (‘The little boy wanted to crawl under the car’)

● Kun je rauw vlees ruiken? (‘Can you smell raw meat?’)

● We gaan het huis in de breedte bouwen (‘We are going to build the house in width rather than length’)

● De vrouw maakte de koe los (‘The woman untied the cow’)

● Ik moet spijkers hebben van die grootte (‘I must have nails of that size’)

● Het was al licht toen het vuur uitging (‘It was already light when the fire went out’)

● De kuikens zijn in de schuur (‘The chickens are in the barn’)

The picture task was comprised of images which were also designed to elicit dialectal pronunciations. The names of items or entities seen within the images, or likely descriptions of actions, contained the vowels which are the objects of this study. Thus it was assumed that participants would use these words, and their pronunciations could then be studied, and

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compared against the results of the less spontaneous task of reading sentences in their dialect.

Participants were encouraged to speak in dialect during both tasks, but it was reasoned that they might be less aware of dialectal pronunciations while undertaking a more spontaneous task. Example pictures shown to participants are included in Figure 37.

Figure 37: Sample pictures used for Picture Task, designed to elicit dialectal pronunciations. Clockwise from top left, the target words are “spijkers”, “nagel”, “kaas”, “paard”, “kruipen”, and “kuikens”.

These pictures, obtained from the online resource Sclera Picto’s, are a sample of what were shown to participants. In the first picture, the target word is spijkers, the Dutch translation for

‘nails’, which belongs to the KIJK lexical set. What was of interest was whether participants pronounced the vowel using the monophthong [i] or the Standard Dutch [εi]. In the second picture, the target word is nagel, the Dutch word for (specifically) a fingernail; in the third picture it is kaas (‘cheese’), both of which belong to the KAAS set; here we are testing whether speakers are using the Standard Dutch vowel, or the fronted Achterhoeks equivalent.

The fourth and fifth pictures, kuikens (‘chickens’) and kruipen (the action of ‘crawling’) are the target words, testing whether participants pronounce the vowel using the Standard Dutch diphthong [œy] or one of the Achterhoeks monophthongs, either [y] or [u]. These belong to the lexical set HUIS. The final picture depicts paard (‘horse’); here we are looking at whether the speakers are using a fronted centring diphthong [iə] or the Standard Dutch [a:].

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The elicited words from both the sentence and picture tasks correspond to the lexical set keywords as follows:

Table 9: Words corresponding to the lexical sets