Comparing foreign accent and Rosengård Swedish: some hypotheses and
initial observations
1. Introduction
1.1 Purpose and outline
Within
the research project ‘Language and language use among young people in multilingual
urban settings’ (Lindberg 2004) my role is to describe SMG pronunciation, the
pronunciation of ‘Swedish on Multilingual Ground’ (e.g. Rosengård Swedish).
Thanks to means placed at my disposal by the Faculty of Humanities at
1.2 Language and language use among young people in
multilingual urban settings
In
Varieties like Rosengård Swedish are primarily a
medium for social functions with other group members (Bijvoet forthc). The
group identity is marked by signals of a non-Swedish background. Examples of
non-Swedish linguistic features, that functions as such signals, are absence of
inversion (V2) in cases where the initial element is not the subject, and a
pronunciation that is perceived as foreign-accented by native speakers of
Swedish.
The project ‘Language and language use among young
people in multilingual urban settings’ has as its overarching goal to describe
and analyze SMG. My particular role in the project is to describe the phonetics
and phonology of SMG.
1.3 Foreign-accented Swedish
In adult
language learners’ Swedish, the pronunciation is often what most clearly stands
out as not being native-like. Even learners with a large Swedish vocabulary and
an advanced grammar, frequently have numerous non-native features in their
pronunciation of Swedish. The prosody of the mother tongue has been argued to
be particularly difficult to avoid transferring to the target language (Bannert
1979, Gårding 1974).
Whereas a considerable amount of
The purpose
of my investigation of foreign-accented Swedish is two-fold. Firstly, I would
like to describe prosodic
2. Materials
2.1 Swedish on Multilingual Ground
The
Rosengård Swedish material analyzed in this paper comes from the speech
database collected by the research project ‘Language and language use among
young people in multilingual urban settings’. During the academic year
2002-2003, the project collected a large amount of comparable data in schools
in Malmö, Gothenburg and
2.2 Swedish as a second language
The recordings
of second language learners of Swedish are being made during 2004. So far, mainly
recordings of international students at
Some material from the database described above (in section
2.1) is also suitable for investigations of foreign accent.
3. Distinguishing between
foreign accent, Rosengård Swedish and standard varieties of Swedish
A comparison of
foreign accent and Rosengård Swedish presupposes that a distinction can be made
between foreign-accented Swedish and Rosengård Swedish. It also presupposes
that a distinction can be made between Rosengård Swedish and other varieties of
Swedish that the recorded subjects may speak, e.g. other types of Malmö youth
languages. Making these distinctions is not easy, and in some cases, probably not
even possible.
There
are reasons for thinking about the observed variation as reflecting three
distinct ways of speaking Swedish, although a continuum of variation – from foreign-accented
Swedish at one end to standard Swedish at the other – probably is a more
accurate description. Some of those reasons have already been mentioned, and
they will be discussed in more detail below. The popular idea that speakers
without an immigrant background can pick up the features of Rosengård Swedish,
and learn how to speak it, suggests that Rosengård Swedish is a variety, a way
to speak that is restricted by a set of more or less conventionalized rules.
Normal word order as an acceptable alternative to V2 word order may be one such
rule, and front /r/ sounds as an alternative to the regional, uvular /r/ sounds
may be another.
Problems
of how to classify a speaker obviously arise when, e.g., the speaker is a
second language learner of Swedish and show transfer from her L1, but at the
same time appears to have Rosengård Swedish as her target language/variety. She
may then also have foreign-sounding features in her speech that cannot be
explained as transfer from her own L1.
A
perception experiment has been designed to test Malmö teachers’ and pupils’
intuition about what Rosengård Swedish sounds like. The results of the
experiment will be reported elsewhere (Hansson & Svensson forthc), as only
ten teachers’ test results have been analyzed so far. However, two preliminary findings
are relevant to mention here. The first is that Rosengård Swedish is spoken by
adolescents without an immigrant background. Even listeners that claimed that
Rosengård Swedish is only spoken by people with an immigrant background, judged
one of the speakers in the experiment – born in
4. Hypotheses and initial observations
4.1 Reductions, length and speech rhythm
The perception of
speech rhythm is related to repetitive patterns in the spoken language, the
recurrence of some kind of speech unit. Pike (1946) suggested
that languages have isochronous units of speech, and that the relevant unit is
either the syllable (in syllable-timed languages) or the foot or interstress-interval
(in stress-timed languages). In other words, the length of each syllable is
said to be of more or less equal length in a syllable-timed language, and each
interstress-interval of approximately the same length in a stress-timed
language. Whereas empirical evidence for isochrony in speech is weak (see Low,
Grabe and Nolan (2001) for a survey of the literature), factors such as the
presence or absence of vowel reduction, the syllable-structure and word stress have
been found to be relevant for the perceived rhythm of a language. In
stress-timed languages, e.g., vowel reduction is more frequently found than in
syllable-timed languages.
The speech rhythm of the mother tongue is one of the
phenomena that can be expected to be transferred to the target language by many
language learners. Therefore, it will be investigated in the recorded L2 learners’
Swedish, and it is interesting to also investigate in SMG varieties such as
Rosengård Swedish.
In a description of Rinkeby
Swedish (a
Kotsinas’ (1990) third
finding has to do with vowel lengths in Rinkeby Swedish. In Swedish, a phonological distinction between long and short vowels is
made. Kotsinas observes that her SMG speakers in Rinkeby produce too long short
vowels and too short long vowels (too long and too short if compared with the
vowels of other speakers in the same region, i.e.
Kotsinas’ findings – the
observed lack of assimilations and reductions where such are expected in
unstressed syllables, and the shortened long vowels and prolonged short vowels
in stressed syllables – are, nevertheless, very interesting. It is possible
that they reflect a different speech rhythm in SMG, a tendency towards
producing syllables of approximately the same length, i.e. towards
syllable-timing. Other stress-timed languages have been reported to exist in syllable-timed
variants in areas where the language comes into contact with other languages.
The lack of reductions in
unstressed syllables, the perceived assignment of almost equal weight to stressed
and unstressed syllables, gives rise to a staccato-like rhythm in SMG (in
Kotsinas works referred to as “stötighet”). The staccato-like rhythm is
interesting because it has also been observed in the so-called ‘Nuuk Danish’ in
Whereas measuring the degree of stress- or
syllable-timing in SMG is not a trivial matter, attempts will be made to do so
in the material described in section 2.2. We will follow Low et al. (2000) and measure the durations
of vowels and the duration of intervals between vowels in a read text. A normalised
Pairwise Variability Index will then be computed for each type of measurement,
and finally be compared with the indexes of typical stress- and syllable-timed
languages. The subjects in Low et al. (2001) read the ‘North Wind and the Sun’ which is the
English version of the same text that the recorded L2 speakers of Swedish are
asked to read (Nordanvinden och solen).
Since SMG is not a variety likely to be used in reading, the same method cannot
be used for investigating syllable-timing in Rosengård Swedish.
4.2 Word accents, final rises and sentence intonation
Swedish is a language with a
lexically and morphologically conditioned distinction of accent type. A word’s
primary stressed syllable is associated with an accent – a ‘word accent’ – which
is either acute (accent I) or grave (accent II). Phonetically, the difference
between accent I and II is one of F0 peak timing. In all dialects of Swedish (except Finland Swedish), the F0 peak of
accent I has an earlier alignment with the stressed syllable than accent II (Bruce
and Gårding 1978).
It is a well known fact that L2 speakers of Swedish
have difficulties in perceiving and producing the word accent distinction
(Bannert 1979). Below, a speaker from the database described in section 2.2 (i.e.
an L2 speaker of Swedish) has produced the minimal pair anden ‘the duck’ – anden ‘the
spirit/genie’. Although the L2 speaker’s accent in ‘spirit/genie’ is fairly
close to a southern Swedish pronunciation, see Figure 1, it is most likely simply
a consequence of a positive transfer, a “free ride”. The same transfer can be observed
in ‘duck’. There it has to be classified as a negative transfer, however. The
speaker’s mother tongue is German.
Figure
1 F0 contours of the minimal pair anden ‘the duck’ (top line) – anden ‘the spirit’ (bottom line) as produced by Peter (code name). The
F0 contour in accent II words in southern Swedish has three turning points[1]: a L at the
beginning of the stressed syllable, a H at the syllable boundary, and a L at
the end of the post-tonic syllable. A final L turning point is not easily
observed in Peter’s speech.
Somewhat surprising, the investigations of the
Rosengård Swedish material so far reveal that Rosengård Swedish word accents
are representative of the Malmö region. In other words, there is a F0 fall in
the stressed syllable of accent I words, and a F0 rise in the stressed syllable
of accent II words. Thus, the most obvious (but perhaps not the most
perceptually salient) way of melodically signalling a non-Swedish background is
left unused.
The speech melody of Rosengård Swedish is,
nevertheless, perceived as foreign-sounding. The foreign-sounding speech melody
appears to be related to another, re-occurring pattern in the material: a
suspended downstep or possible upstep, that sometimes ends with a final rise,
see Figure 2.
Figure
2 F0 contour of Fy,
ja(g) Èdissa(de) Èalla ‘Hey, I dissed everyone’. The words dissade and alla are associated with grave accents/accents II (here transcribed
as HL accents[2]),
and the phrase ends with a final rise (H%). The speaker is E04.
The above-mentioned intonation pattern is used by
subjects with different linguistic backgrounds (i.e. with different L1s),
including by a subject without immigrant background (who nevertheless was
judged as speaking Rosengård Swedish in the perception experiment presented
above). Some evidence to support an awareness of the intonation pattern as a
feature of Rosengård Swedish is given in (1). The recorded subject (D49) describes
Rosengård Swedish. She illustrates Rosengård Swedish with an example that
contains normal word order (idag vi
lovade), and then repeats it with a suspended downstep.
1. Det är
ofta så, typ i Rosengård.
Idag
vi lovade. Så snackar ni. Idag vi lovade.
Absense of Suspended
Inversion (V2)
downstep
‘It’s
often so, like in Rosengård. Today
we promised. That’s how you talk. Today we promised.’
(Speaker D49)
Whether
or not the observed pattern is identified as a feature of Rosengård Swedish by
speakers of Rosengård Swedish as well as by speakers of other varieties of
Swedish is of great interest to us. In this first stage of the study of SMG
pronunciation, potential features of the SMG varieties are sought in the
material. We have to make use both of our knowledge of typical regional
features (so that they can be singled out) and of our intuitions about SMG in
the search, and it is important to look for support for the conclusions drawn
in the perception experiment’s results. Stimuli produced by E04 and D49, the
speakers in the examples above, were classified as Rosengård Swedish by a
majority of the listeners in the perception experiment. E04 appeared in two
stimuli, but the listeners only judged the stimulus containing an example of
the above-mentioned intonation pattern as Rosengård Swedish.
The phonological analysis of
the intonation pattern is not yet complete, and it remains to see if it has an
origin in any of the L1s of the immigrants in Rosengård. At several seminars,
it has been suggested to me that the speech melody in the examples above is influenced
by Arabic. Confirmation of such an Arabic influence was, however, not obtained
when the sound examples were played to an Arabic-speaking prosodist (Sam
Hellmuth, personal communication)[3]. An Arabic-influenced speech melody in SMG
has some support in popular beliefs (Borda-Pedreira 2003).
We do not yet know if the
observed intonation pattern has a counterpart in the materials recorded in
Gothenburg and
5. Future work
Rosengård
Swedish and other similar varieties have an obvious relation to foreign-accented
Swedish. The comparison of SMG and foreign-accented Swedish is expected to
prove fruitful for both lines of research. The description of SMG cannot be completed
without its influences from other languages becoming known, i.e. without
further studies of transfer in
Acknowledgements
This
research has been supported by means from the ‘Faculty of Humanities’ research
funds 2003’ (Lund University) and
the research project ‘Language and language use among young people in
multilingual urban settings’ (financed
by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, Grant No. 2000-5124:01).
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* Affiliations: Department of
Linguistics and Phonetics and Department of Scandinavian Languages,
[1] Note that a turning point is not
necessarily a reflex of a tone, but simply a phonetic turning point accessible
to empirical observation in the F0 contour.
[2] The phonological analysis that
motivates this way of transcribing southern Swedish grave accents is discussed
in Hansson (2003), pp 94-97.
[3] Her expertise obviously does
not include all Arabic dialects, however.