Affiliation:
1. Institute for Language and Folklore
Abstract
In Sweden, an ongoing sound change is resulting in the pronunciation of short /œ/ and short /ɵ/ becoming more similar. This chapter examines the relationship between the two sounds in the region of Uppland, situated in Central Sweden. It summarises the results of three tests conducted to investigate the informants’ production and perception of this sound change as well as their attitudes towards it. By combining the results of the production test with the informants’ categorisations in the perception test, the original study showed that those informants with a small phonetic distance between /œ/ and /ɵ/ in their own speech were better at categorising vowel stimuli correctly than the speakers who had a larger phonetic distance.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company