Evaluating Regional Accent Variation in Standard Dutch

Abstract

This article investigates native speakers’ attitudes toward accent variation in Netherlandic Standard Dutch. Adopting the speaker evaluation paradigm, a demographically controlled sample of listener-judges rated spontaneous speech samples that are representative of four regions in the Netherlands, and from which potentially competing linguistic cues (e.g., pitch and intonation) had not been removed. Speech stimuli were rated on a set of scales integrated from among previous studies conducted in the Low Countries. Regionally marked standard accents activated distinct attitude profiles that were largely invariant with respect to the age, gender, level of education, and regional provenance of the listener-judges. It is argued that these regionally flavored standard varieties were found to be more than social categorization cues: Data reveal that an accent elicits perceptions of its so-called intrinsic euphony and norm status in addition to the status and integrity of its speakers.