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Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII: Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), Leeuwarden, June 2019
Edited by Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen
[Studies in Language Variation 25] 2021
► pp. 79–110

Chapter 4
Modeling regional variation in voice onset time of Jutlandic varieties of Danish

ORCID logo | Universiteit Leiden

It is a well-known overt feature of the Northern Jutlandic variety of Danish that /t/ is pronounced with short voice onset time and no affrication. This is not limited to Northern Jutland, but shows up across the peninsula. This paper expands on this research, using a large corpus to show that complex geographical patterns of variation in voice onset time is found in all fortis stops, but not in lenis stops. Modeling the data using generalized additive mixed modeling both allows us to explore these geographical patterns in detail, as well as test a number of hypotheses about how a number of environmental and social factors affect voice onset time.

Keywords: Danish, Jutlandic, phonetics, microvariation, regional variation, stop realization, voice onset time, aspiration, generalized additive mixed modeling
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical preliminaries
    • 2.1Voice onset time
    • 2.2Danish plosives
    • 2.3The dialects of Jutland
    • 2.4Language variation and geography
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Token selection
    • 3.3Acoustic analysis
    • 3.4Statistical modeling
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Descriptive statistics
    • 4.2Generalized additive mixed model
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.25.04pug
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