#sociophonetics

[coquelicoq]

first off, if you want to spend more time way overthinking r sounds, there's a GREAT doctoral thesis about r variation in standard dutch. "The Sociophonetics and Phonology of Dutch r" by Koen Sebregts. i still haven't read all of it, but spent most of a dinner talking at my mother and sister about it until they were like "please we are begging you to discuss this with literally anyone else". secondly, /ɥ/ :)

[shipping myself with french phonemes ask game]

you always know exactly what to recommend to me. if i were at that dinner you could talk to me about the sociophonetics and phonology of dutch r by koen sebregts as long as you wanted. rip to your mom and sister and any other bystanders but at least we would be happy!!

i was hoping someone would ask about /ɥ/...this sound has been shrouded in mystery for as long as i can remember. we're talking as early as when i learned to count to dix (because of huit). it was one of the sounds i could hear but could not for the life of me figure out how people were making. it's like we grew up across the street from each other, and she was a little older than me and so smart and pretty and carefree and i grew up just yearning. from afar. knowing that /ɥ/ didn't even know i existed.

so you'd think, what, unrequited pining? WRONG. this is ESTABLISHED RELATIONSHIP. didn't see that coming did you!!!! that's right, i can now pronounce the /ɥ/ sound. i can say it with my own mouth. and i do! i am saying this sound all over the place! we have ridden off into the sunset! we are on our honeymoon! it is happily ever after all up in here!!!

it's kind of interesting how this came about. i couldn't figure out how to make this sound until i learned how to identify and pronounce the /y/ sound, which makes sense given /ɥ/ is the semivocalic equivalent of /y/, but also makes no sense because then why could i identify /ɥ/ even before i could identify /y/? you'd think i would be able to hear both or neither, but not just one. and yet that is what happened. also, there was about a year between getting comfortable with /y/ and sealing the deal with /ɥ/. not sure what that was about either...like if you can make /y/ you can make /ɥ/, they're the same sound, they just occur in different environments...what would this trope be...ummm this is like if she were a superhero and i were dating her alter ego while also pining after the superhero. like babe i have good news for you! but also it's a little embarrassing after a year of dating to not be able to recognize someone when they take their glasses off.

in any case this is a very recent development, probably within the last year ish? it took me over two decades but i got there in the end. slow burn, happy ending. now if only i could figure out why word-final high vowels sound super aspirated sometimes, which is odd because aspiration is a consonant thing. (current theory is devoicing.) my beautiful wife /ɥ/ gives me the courage to be curious. if i can learn to make /ɥ/, i can learn to make anything. dreams do come true!!

[whatiwillsay]

cam can you share the link to the video you said you were watching about sociophonetics and how they can tell someone is gay by their voice pretty please??

here you go! 💙

there’s way more videos on the topic including ones about lesbians but that was the first i saw on it!

[ihatecispeople]

ah cringe, asked to sit in on a course on qualitative sociolinguistics by our department's new sociophonetics staff member but have a doctors visit scheduled during the first lesson next week. have to send my apologies and confirm that im still interested in sitting in on this course and the semester hasn't even started smh

[sorchanitua]

University of Kentucky Assistant Professorship in Sociolinguistics -- DEADLINE 4/4

Deadline: April 4 (posted on HEJ 3/28) Length/Track: Tenure track Description: “The ideal candidate will have demonstrated research expertise in Sociolinguistics with an emphasis on African American Languages (AAL) and sociophonetics along with secondary expertise in variationist sociolinguistics, American Englishes, and field methods, and an ability to teach courses in a range of these…

[linguistlist-blog]

TOC: Asia-Pacific Language Variation Vol. 9, No. 2 (2024)

2023. iii, 140 pp. Table of Contents ARTICLES Variation in the Fataluku voiced coronal (j) James Grama, Tyler M. Heston & Melody Ann Ross pp. 125–155 Directional constructions in Matukar Panau: A Bayesian approach to assessing variation Kira Davey & Danielle Barth pp. 156–194 Sociophonetic variation in the alveolar lateral in Yami Li-Fang Lai & Shelome Gooden pp. 195–238 Variation in the bird-name lexicon in Qaqet (East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea) Henrike Frye & Aung Si pp. 23 http://dlvr.it/T2p53K

[strohller27]

frikken edited-in crowd noises makin’ it hard for me to do my acoustic analysis >/

[blacklinguist]

my car is on the fritz for the next week which means i have to leave for work earlier which means breakfast won’t last me as long which means almonds will be my snack of choice 🌚

[possessivesuffix]

Tarvitsen, tarvitten, tartten, tarviin…

So I’ve started charting how *ts gets rendered in my idolect(s), and in the process, I am learning new things about Colloquial Finnish I had never noticed.

The usual deal is that *ts in native vocabulary gets rendered as /ts/ only in Standard Finnish. The spoken dialects instead tend to have /tt/ or /ht/. Modern colloquial Finnish of most of southern and western Finland sides with /tt/ — while the southeastern Ostrobothnian savolaiskiila dialect, that my mother and her parents speak, also allows /ht/. So I’ve native familiarity with all three main variants. /ts/ however gets left as-is in all sorts of newer vocabulary that never went through the traditional dialects: learned vocabulary (hertsi, otsoni, satsuma), recent loans (koutsi ‘coach’, matsi ‘sports match’), Helsinki slang (funtsia ‘to think’, kartsa ‘street’) and general neologisms (itsari ‘suicide’, rantsu ‘beach’).

Factor in consonant gradation and additional interesting things happen. Normally, /tt/ and /ht/ that come from original *tt and *ht gradate to /t/ and /hd/ ~ /hr/ ~ /h/; but depending on the dialect, /tt/ and /ht/ that come from *ts may be exempt from this. There’s also a fifth pattern where *ts gives /ht/ : /t/.

(Here’s a map of the situation, including also rarer variants that I’m not sure are in use anymore today.)

I was expecting to find some variation in which words allow /ht/, versus which allow /tt/. No such thing seems to come up in substantial numbers however. Almost any word that allows /tt/ will also allow /ht/, and vice versa (metsä ‘forest, woods’ → mettä ~ mehtä; seitsemän ‘7’ → seittemän ~ seihtemän).

Interestingly enough though, there is some variation depending on the position of *ts in a word. Between a first and second syllable, I only find three nonstandard gradation patterns grammatical: /tt/ : /tt/, /tt/ : /t/ and /ht/ : /ht/ (mettän, metän, mehtän). But between a second and third syllable, things differ: in my heritage dialect a pattern /ht/ : /h/ now turns up (häirihten ~ häirihen ‘I bother’, for standard Fi. häiritsen), while in colloquial Finnish, the pattern /tt/ : /t/ disappears entirely (häiritten, but not ˣhäiriten). This is also followed by the contracted form tarvitten ‘I need’ (standard tarvitsen) → tartten, but not ˣtarten.

Word derivation also has pretty big effects. For example katsoa ‘to look’ is a typical basic-register word that allows the variants kattoa, kahtoa (katon, kahton, etc.) just fine. However, its derivative katse ‘sight, gaze’ is firmly in the literary register. I would deem ˣkatte, ˣkate, ˣkahte clearly ungrammatical (and I might have trouble even parsing the latter two).

This has also led me to notice an interesting unrelated pattern in verb inflection. Finnish verbs ending in -tse- are currently somewhat recessive: especially colloquially they tend to be replaced with corresponding basic vowel-stem or contraction verbs (with which they are already homophonous in the infinitive and a couple of other forms). So, for example tupakoida : tupakoitsen : tupakoitsee ‘to smoke tobacco’ (infinitive, 1PS, 3PS) tends towards the inflection tupakoin : tupakoi instead. Similarly tarvita : tarvitsen : tarvitsee ‘to need’ may also yield a third (!) inflection type in colloquial Finnish: tarviin, tarvii.

But this seems to fail in some cases. E.g. tulkita : tulkitsen ‘to interpret’ does not produce an expected colloquial form ˣtulkkiin; similarly merkitä : merkitsen ‘to mark down, note’, but not ˣmerkkiin. The key element seems to be consonant gradation: -tse-stem verbs have the key feature that the word root is always in the weak grade, while contraction verbs allow alternation (as in merkata : merkkaan ‘to mark’). The corresponding merkitä : ˣmerkkiin (with consonant gradation before -itA : -ii-) has, however, no precedents, and seems to therefore fail to materialise. Alternately though, gradation may be simply “forgotten”. While tarvita comes from earlier *tarbittak (compare the noun tarve : tarpeen ‘need’, or the adjective tarpeellinen ‘useful, necessary’), /rv/ is common enough also as an underlying basic consonant cluster, and hence the colloquial contraction-verb inflection comes out as tarviin and not ˣtarpiin.

Finally, an amusing case of a -tse-verb and its corresponding basic contraction verb drifting out of sync semantically: isännöidä : isännöitsen ‘to manage property, esp. a building’; but isännöidä : isännöin ‘to act as a host, esp. at an event’. This has probably been mediated by distinct actor nouns: isännöitsijä ‘property manager’, versus isäntä ‘host’.

[makingnoiseandhearingthings]

How well do Google and Microsoft and recognize speech across dialect, gender and race?

How well do Google and Microsoft and recognize speech across dialect, gender and race?

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you may remember that last year I found that YouTube’s automatic captions didn’t work as well for some dialects, or for women. The effects I found were pretty robust, but I wanted to replicate them for a couple of reasons:

I only looked at one system, YouTube’s automatic captions, and even that was over a period of several years instead of at just one…

[prettyboyporter]

sepia, red ochre, and lemon !!

HI HELLO BB I MISS YOU. TY for the ask! XXXOOOO

sepia; name five things that always make you happy.1) Joe’s music 2) homebrew/craft beer 3) the smell of beer being brewed 4) being told I’m cute/flirted with 5) chocolate

red ochre; are you more right-brained (creative) or left-brained (analytical)?Ah I’m def more creative! I struggle with analytical stuff and usually find my mind wandering when conversations go that way. This is why the bf always formulates my beer recipes but I change it on the fly depending on my mood and it drives him crazy lol

lemon; what’s your comfort food?Oh man I have so many, lol. Piizza, chili, grilled cheese, homemade chicken noodle soup, mac n cheese. Fried chicken. Pot roast made by @usstrashbarge I’d eat ANY of those to make my soul feel better.

[whatiwillsay]

anti-gaylor queer people are seriously such tender queers because they dont realize how normal sexuality speculation is in irl queer spaces. ESPECIALLY in non western countries

i was just watching a video about sociophonetics and how you can tell some people are gay by their voices and it’s a real scientifically proven thing. like sorry sometimes we can tell someone’s sexuality without them confirming it but it’s literally just part of being a human.

[ihatecispeople]

21/22 overall grade for my IPA transcription. fank u 😸😸😸

[farwestlinguist]

august 9th: dissertation topic vs. areas of interest

question for phdblrs / phd holders: how did you decide on your dissertation topic in regard to your areas of interest?

elaborating:

sociophonetics is my wheelhouse, but i do like a lot of different topics within the 'socio' part of that (gender, race, advocacy/activism, disability rights, neurodivergency, etc.). it would be fun to really make my topic super interdisciplinary, but as of now, my topic is race (and/or gender) + phonetics essentially. that's fine, i just have many interests that i'm unsure should be integrated into my dissertation, or left for smaller projects/papers/conferences/outreach!

how do you know when enough is enough for your dissertation idea?

[linguistlist-blog]

Jobs: Phonetics, Sociolinguistics: Postdoc in (Socio)Phonetics, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral position in phonetics/sociophonetics at the Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan. The successful candidate will work under the supervision of Professor Andries Coetzee. We seek a phonetician who is comfortable working with data from sociolinguistic interviews as well as with laboratory-based data. Preference will be given to applicants who have a background in statistical and quantitative modeling, speech processing experiments (lexical de http://dlvr.it/T2W9qp

[superlinguo]

Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Product Manager

A lot of tech people I know say “the best skill a programmer can have is knowing how to look up the right answer on Stack Exchange” It’s one of those websites that people use every day, but perhaps without thinking about how it gets built. Megan Risdal is one of the people who make Stack Overflow happen, as a Product Manager leading Public Q&A. As Megan mentions below, there’s even a Linguistics Stack Exchange (you might just see some old answers from me there). Megan has not only forged a career for herself in tech, she helps demystify the industry for other linguists who might follow in her footsteps, on Twitter (@MeganRisdal) and her blog.

What did you study at university?

My undergraduate degree is in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire where my interests were in individual differences. I also did a minor in French and this is where I first learned about linguistics as a field of study. My combined interests in language and individual differences psychology led me to completing a senior thesis project on variation in attitudes towards linguistic diversity. Just last year this work was published with my then advisor, Dr. Erica Benson, as a chapter in Language Regard: Methods, Variation, and Change.

From here, I did a Master's degree in Sociolinguistics at North Carolina State University. Building on my statistics background from studying psychology, I dove deeper into quantitative methods, learning R along the way, while focusing on sociophonetics and laboratory phonology. For my capstone project, I measured articulatory (ultrasound tongue imaging), aerodynamic, (nasal/oral airflow), and acoustic variation in coarticulatory vowel nasalization strategies among Anglo-American and African American (Vernacular) English speakers.

Finally, I started a PhD at UCLA where I intended to continue studying laboratory phonology. I only ended up finishing one year which was spent on theoretical foundations, articulatory phonetics, and learnability before leaving with a second Master's degree in Linguistics. I ended up deciding to leave academia because I was disillusioned already with the prospect of the job market and the limited potential for my work to have impact beyond academia. I made my mind up when I applied for a job at Google and got an interview. I ultimately failed, but this was enough for me to feel confident my resume was "good enough" (completely incidentally I ended up later getting hired and working at Google for a couple of years prior to my current role).

What is your job?

For the past six months I've been working as a Product Manager at Stack Overflow where I lead the team working on public Q&A. If you're not familiar with Stack Overflow, it's a site where anyone who codes can come to find answers to their programming questions. We also have the Stack Exchange network which has similar Q&A sites for other topics like cooking and anime. There's even a Linguistics Stack Exchange site.

In my day-to-day, as a product manager, I work closely with our developers, designers, researchers, data scientists, community managers, marketing, and leadership. So, it's a lot of meetings and a lot of Google Docs. My job entails taking many, many inputs and synthesizing them into a strategy and product roadmap that the team executes on to make Stack Overflow a more useful, engaging place for all developers. On a given day, you could catch me writing a new feature specification for a developer, reviewing results of an experiment with our data scientists, or dropping in on user interviews. One of the things I love the most about my job is the variety. If a project is slipping or we just don't have the resources for something important, I'm the person who can step in and do what it takes to make sure the work of my collaborators adds up to something successful.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

My training in linguistics absolutely helps me.

First, and most importantly I believe, my background in sociolinguistics has taught me the significance of diversity among groups of people (like users of a product) in so many ways. For example, Stack Overflow sees many millions of users every month, but we know that not everyone is equally likely to participate on the site. There are huge, intimidating barriers to participation which disproportionately impact different groups of people depending on things like their background and experience coding. So every day I think about how changes to the product will affect different types of users. Me and my team are constantly striving to better understand the important ways our users vary in their backgrounds, motivations, and pain points and how we can better meet their needs. Especially in a globally diverse online community like ours where users interact and community with each other it's extremely important for me and my colleagues to think about always.

Second, and more concretely, the quantitative methods and experimental best practices I acquired while studying linguistics are highly applicable to my day-to-day job. We make use of a lot of different qualitative and quantitative research methods at Stack Overflow and having training in this area allows me to leverage these resources effectively in my product decision-making. Before I joined Stack Overflow, I had also spent some time as a data scientist, so my background in statistics and R was extremely relevant there. Without this training, I don't think I would be where I am today.

Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

Overall, I'm very happy with my trajectory. I'm extremely grateful to everyone who supported me at every stage and I would not be where I am today without all of these experience (yes including dropping out of a PhD!). That said, some thing that I wish I had encountered sooner are:

Seriously, build a public portfolio. Make your work visible. Curate an online presence. Having even a just a modest Twitter following and some publicly discoverable content with my name on it has helped me immeasurably in my career. Oh, and learn git.

Pay some attention to what's going on outside of your academic bubble. I fully intended to stay in academia when I started my PhD at UCLA. Had I thought somewhat ahead of time about the possibility that I would end up industry, I may have prioritized different classes or perhaps even chosen a different PhD program altogether. For example, if you have a choice between learning OCaml and Python, maybe see what non-academia has to say, too, as an input to your decision. Then again, hindsight is 2020. I would have seriously regretted not taking statistics/research methods under any circumstances, though.

Any other thoughts or comments?

I think every tech company should look to hire people trained in linguistics. There are so, so many ways in which a background in linguistics is relevant to so many careers in tech. From user research to data science to (apparently) product management, a background in linguistics adds a unique and valuable perspective. If you're not sure what you're qualified for, carefully tailor your experience, cast your net wide, and seek out advice!

More from Megan

Twitter @MeganRisdal

LinkedIn 

Personal blog

Recently:

Interview with a Communications Specialist

Interview with a Learning Scientist

Interview with a Lexicographer

Interview with a Journalist

Interview with a PR Consultant

Check out the Linguist Jobs Master List and the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews  

[blacklinguist]

notes on measuring speech production.