(Un)intelligibility: A phonetic question or is it a matter of attitude

Ying Ying Tan

Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

LPL (Aix-En-Provence): Feb 22nd, 11h, Conference Room

Slides

In this seminar, I present the results of a recent study conducted to elicit international responses to Singapore English (SgE), in terms of both intelligibility and attitudes toward the speaker, as compared to American English. One of the biggest concerns of educationists and language policy makers in Singapore is that SgE is not an “internationally acceptable English” (Singapore Ministry of Education, 2001), and is thus not intelligible to the other English speakers. The question however is: is SgE really unintelligible outside of Singapore? If SgE is to be viewed negatively, is it due to unintelligibility or could it be attitudes and perceptions toward this variety of English? There is, at present, very little research to show how well SgE is understood in international contexts, and even less investigating international attitudes towards the variety.It is therefore the aim of this paper to address the following questions, based on the responses of over 200 respondents from over 20 countries as they listen to a set of 15 sound recordings, including read SgE, spontaneous SgE, and read American English:

1. How intelligible is SgE internationally and how does SgE compare to AmE in terms of intelligibility?
2. What is the attitude toward SgE internationally and how does SgE compare to AmE in terms of attitudes toward these two varieties?

Using these results of this study, I hope to take the research forward in the future by looking at some possible phonetic features that may contribute to unintelligibility.

Speaker bio:

 Ying-Ying TAN is a sociophonetician who looks at how speech and accent, especially of individuals and communities in multilingual environments, encode social information. Outside of phonetics, she also works on language planning and policy, looking at how the State manages ethnolinguistic diversity and engineers multilingual individuals through language, education and media policies. Her articles have appeared in journals such as The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Pragmatics, and English World-wide. She has recently been awarded the Fung Global Fellowship by Princeton University, and will spend the 2013/14 academic year at Princeton.

Talk given at the Laboratoire Parole et Langage on Dec 2nd, 2011.

TAN Ying Ying (Nanyang Technological University)

——
In linguistic ecologies where multiple languages co-exist and language
contact creates language variation and language change, the process of data
collection is complicated by a set of factors that will need careful
manipulation and consideration. This talk aims to highlight some linguistic
complexities that need to be considered in a multilingual context such as
Singapore, where its linguistic ecology consists of over 20 different languages
and its population almost entirely multilingual. Besides presenting an overview
of the linguistic situation in Singapore, I will also present the findings of a
few of my studies on prosody, ethnic accent perception and a sociophonetic
study of rhotics in Singapore English, and argue that there are phonetic
variants, both in production and perception, that are closely correlated to
ethnicity, age, education and socioeconomic status. Given such complexities,
one could ask what then is the possibility and feasibility of building a speech
recognition system for Singapore. And in the age where there is an increasing
need to profile speakers by the way they speak, one could also ask how these
phonetic variants will complicate matters in a multilingual context such as
Singapore. These are some of the questions that I would like to pose as future
research possibilities.

slides