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Part of
The Continuity of Linguistic Change: Selected papers in honour of Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda
Edited by Matilde Vida-Castro and Antonio Manuel Ávila-Muñoz
[Studies in Language Variation 31] 2024
► pp. 36–55

Chapter 2
A Swedish merger

Production and perception of the short vowels /œ/ and /ɵ/

| Institute for Language and Folklore , Sweden

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.

Keywords: sociophonetics, sound change, perception, vowel, phoneme merger, phonetics, dialectology, Swedish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Production test
    • 3.1Key results of the production test
    • 3.2Contextual effect
  • 4.Perception test
    • 4.1Discussion of the perception test
  • 5.Attitudinal test
  • 6.Comparison between production and perception
    • 6.1Results of the combined analysis
  • 7.Summarising discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.31.02wen
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