Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
Editor and Book Reviews Editor: John Edwards (St Francis Xavier University, Canada)
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Volume: 22 Number: 6 Page: 491–501
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Mind Your Speech: Language Attitudes in Cyprus
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Andreas N. Papapavlou
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Earlier studies have shown that Greek Cypriots hold more favourable attitudes towards Standard Modern Greek (SMG) than towards their own dialect. The present study further examines the issue of language
attitudes by investigating the social dimensions of certain phonological forms of the dialect. The study examines whether Greek Cypriots find the presence of certain sounds in their dialect as 'harsher'
and less 'pleasant' than their corresponding underlying phonemes in SMG. More specifically, an experimental attempt was made to examine whether the presence of /dz/ or /∫/ has any differential effects
on Cypriots' attitudes towards their dialect. Two groups of 66 randomly selected university students listened to two especially designed stories and were asked to (1) evaluate the speaker's speech code
(i.e. whether it is found to be 'heavily' accented Cypriot), (2) guess the speaker's educational attainment and (3) indicate the degree of the speaker's comprehensibility. The results showed that the frequent
appearance of the sound /∫/ is perceived as a less pleasant sound than /dz/ and marks the speaker's utterances as more Cypriot-accented speech. However, the speaker's educational attainment cannot be
fully judged and the frequent appearance of these sounds does not appear to affect comprehension.
© Multilingual Matters 2001
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