Social factors in accent recognition: A perceptual-dialectology study of Frisian

We present a perceptual-dialectological study of regional variation in Frisian, a minority language spoken in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands. There is a moderate body of work on Frisian dialectology, but no known insight about how variation in Frisian is perceived and used by language users. Our work fills part of this gap by focusing on listener-related factors in the perception of regional accents. We designed a map-based accent-recognition task based on forty 20-second fragments of regionally-accented speech from twenty localities. We conducted an online experiment with 1,848 Frisian listeners, in which participants listened to the provided fragment and indicated in a Google-Maps interface where they believed the speaker to be from. These listeners’ own regional origins were highly varied, making the results geographically representative. We used a gamma location-scale GAM to test listener-related factors hypothesized to affect the magnitudes of listeners’ accent-recognition errors. In contrast to results of a study on Dutch, we did not find significant effects of listener gender nor education; however, similar to the previous Dutch results, we did obtain a curvilinear age effect, an effect of the geographical distance between speaker and listener, and an effect of listener geographical origin. We also found a small effect of the zoom level listeners used in Google Maps during the experiment. We conclude that listener-related factors shape sensitivity to language variation not only on the comparatively large scale of a country such as the Netherlands as a whole, but also in a small, complex, and highly socially cohesive language situation like that of a single province where a minority language is spoken.