Voice-placing strategies and folk ideas of L2-accented Icelandic.

Perceptions of familiarity, cultural stereotypes, and phonological features

Abstract

For a long time, Iceland has been a monoethnic and monolingual speech community, in which the Icelandic language has both served as a main element in the construction and maintenance of national identity and in which a stable evaluation system has been in place for the standard variety. Recently, however, new demographic and sociolinguistic circumstances have emerged due to increasing immigration, and, thus, rising numbers of L2 speakers of Icelandic. Against this background, it is interesting to investigate what ideas L1 speakers connect with L2 accents in Icelandic and how they link different L2 accents with the geographic origin of the L2 speaker.

Drawing on methods rooted in perceptual dialectology and folk linguistics, five focus groups with thirty-two L1-speaker participants were conducted, employing a semi-structured interview guide. The participants were presented with a voice-placing task involving six verbal guises and asked to elaborate on their choices freely, thus providing emic themes connected to their voice-placing strategies. Verbal guises were produced by one L1 speaker of Icelandic and five L2 speakers with L1 American English, Danish, Tagalog, Lithuanian, and Polish. Consistent with the folk linguistic approach taken in this study, data analysis employed concepts from grounded theory.

Results show that participants identify an L2 accent with great precision but experience difficulties locating an L2 accent. As to their voice-placing decisions, they resort to three main strategies, i. e. perceptions of familiarity with an accent, cultural stereotypes, and phonological features in L2 speech. Those strategies are further influenced by folk ideas on and perceptions of the speakersʼ L2 competence and accent-mimicking ability, their effort towards learning Icelandic, and perceptions of accentedness and distinct phonological features.