Mild regional accents are more superior, but broad accents are more dynamic.

What is it about?

In the Netherlands, legend has it that there is only one prestige accent (that of the Randstad, the urbanized region in the west) while all other accents are non-prestigious. A new speaker evaluation experiment, however, demonstrates that allegedly low prestige accents like the southern Limburg accent are deemed very inferior only when they are broad: milder versions of the Limburg accent (which can still be recognized) are evaluated much more positively (mildly accented Limburg females are not significantly different in this respect from broadly-accented Randstad females). Crucially, broadly-accented Randstad females are penalized on the status dimension for their stronger accent, but not on the dynamism (modern prestige) dimension. All in all, our data suggest that a remapping is taking place in the domain of accent evaluation from purely qualitative to more quantitative criteria.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This study confirms the pivotal impact of the (often neglected) variable accent strength on impression formation. By including accent strength in speaker evaluation (matched guise) experiments, we can obtain a much better fit between prestige distributions and language production aspects like the frequency of, or the tolerance for an accent.