2025P Attitudes towards accent variation in word-final nasal vowels in Polish

Polish is one of the last Slavic languages with nasal vowels (Sussex & Cubberley, 2006). They occur word-medially and word-finally, with the latter exhibiting regional variation. There are three commonly attested variants for the word-final nasal vowels. Nasalised diphthongs [ɔw̃/ɛw̃] are the Standard Polish pronunciation (Gussmann, 2007), considered the most ‘correct’ in prescriptive literature (Dunaj, 2006). The other variants include non-standard realisations such as denasalisation (i.e. [ɔ/ɛ]) and nasal stopping (i.e. [ɔm/ɛn]). These are viewed as non-standard and thus heavily stigmatised and avoided by speakers (Baranowska & Kaźmierski, 2020; Johnson, 1984). This paper investigates the empirical support for these observations from the literature by means of a speaker-evaluation experiment. It does this by examining attitudes towards accent variation using Polish nasal vowels and comparing the judgements towards standard and non-standard variants.

Eighteen native Polish participants took part in an online matched-guise experiment where they were asked to evaluate speakers based on their suitability to work as a newscaster (cf. Levon & Fox, 2014). The three guises—nasalised diphthongs, denasalisation, and nasal stopping—were each measured along three dimensions: status, solidarity, and pretentiousness (Grondelaers, van Hout & Steegs, 2010; Tamminga, 2017).

Figure 1 summarises the rating averages for the matched-guise task. Linear mixed-effects regression shows that the standard variant (i.e. nasalised diphthong) was judged the most favourably and elicited significantly higher ratings for status and pretentiousness than the non-standard variants. There was no significant difference between denasalisation and nasal stopping. Additionally, although the participants were all from Podlasie, a region characterised by non-standard speech, they notably favoured the standard. The findings highlight the high status and, contrastively, the perceived pretentiousness of the standard language. They also showcase the stigmatisation of non-standard varieties in the face of the standard, in line with previous research.

Figure 1: see attachment

References

Baranowska, K., & Kaźmierski, K. (2020). Polish word-final nasal vowels. Sociolinguistic Studies, 14(1-2), 135–162. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.37918
Dunaj, B. (2006). Zasady poprawnej wymowy polskiej [Rules for correct Polish pronunciation]. Język polski, 86(3), 161–172.
Grondelaers, S., van Hout, R., & Steegs, M. (2010). Evaluating Regional Accent Variation in Standard Dutch. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(1), 101–116. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X09351681
Gussmann, E. (2007). The phonology of Polish. Oxford University Press.
Johnson, J. (1984). Variations in Polish nasal /ę/: A contribution to the development of contrastive sociolinguistic methodology. Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics, 18, 31–41.
Levon, E., & Fox, S. (2014). Social Salience and the Sociolinguistic Monitor: A Case Study of ING and TH-fronting in Britain. Journal of English Linguistics, 42(3), 185-217. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424214531487
Sussex, R., & Cubberley, P. (2006). Phonology. In The Slavic Languages (pp. 110–191). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486807.006
Tamminga, M. (2017). Matched guise effects can be robust to speech style. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 142(1), EL18–EL23. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4990399