FOS: Cesko Voeten research talk Monday, February 10th 12:00-1:30pm B-243 Wells Hall

[Wagner, Suzanne]

Dear all,

Cesko Voeten (Leiden University) will be giving a research presentation titled "The adoption of sound change by sociolinguistic migrants" on Monday, February 10th, from 12:00-1:30pm in B-243 Wells Hall. An abstract is below. We hope to see many of you there.

Suzanne Wagner

on behalf of the Sociolinguistics search committee

———
Cesko Voeten
Leiden University



12:00 - 1:30pm, B-243 Wells Hall



The adoption of sound change by sociolinguistic migrants



This paper investigates the adoption of regional differences that are the result of on-going change in the vowel system of Dutch. Due to multiple interrelated changes, of which the most notorious is Stroop’s (1998) ‘Polder Dutch’, the varieties of Dutch spoken in the Netherlands versus Flanders have grown wider apart. This has created new sociolinguistic variables, among them the realization of /e:,ø:,o:/, which in Flanders only have these realizations, but in the Netherlands alternate with diphthongs [ei,øy,ou]. This paper investigates whether, when, and how this variable is adopted by sociolinguistic migrants (‘SMs’): Flemish young adults who migrate to the Netherlands to start their university studies.



The SMs are compared to Netherlandic-Dutch controls over the course of nine months. Three perspectives are considered: production, perception, and processing. Previous research (Evans & Iverson 2007) has shown that sociolinguistic migrants eagerly adopt regional differences in vowel realization on a comparable time scale, by a process which both Auer & Hinskens (2005) and Sonderegger (2012) term ‘change by accommodation’. These results are not corroborated in the present experiments, but are replicated by a follow-up experiment with a different group of Flemish sociolinguistic migrants who have lived in the Netherlands for multiple years. This suggests that the adoption of variation does not take place via repeated instances of short-term accommodation, but rather through a separate process. Neurolinguistic experiments per Lanwermeyer et al (2016), performed on the original group of sociolinguistic migrants, confirm this. While initially, the SMs are less sensitive to the novel [e:]~[ei] distinction, after nine months’ time they process this distinction in the same way as the Netherlandic controls.



Combining the three perspectives shows that sociolinguistic migrants adopt regional variation, and that this visibly takes multiple years, but that the brain invisibly changes sooner. The different results suggest a major role for sociolinguistic salience, which has important implications for the study of language variation and change.



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Suzanne Evans Wagner | she, her, hers
Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director of Graduate Studies
B-401 Wells Hall
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824

Tel: +1 (517) 355-9739
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