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Paper abstract:

One of the most widespread language ideologies associated with Kazakh dialects sees speakers from the Western region being fast speakers (Bizhanova, 2022). This condition is linked to the self-reported inability of speakers of other regions to understand Western Kazakh (WK):

‘It seems that we can’t beat the Westerners [in speaking fast]. Yes, really. I don’t understand the words of people from the West region’ [MCSKL mobi141121.wav]

Folk accounts of the phenomenon indicate that acoustic correlates of speech (speech rate and phonological reduction) are the underlying reasons why WK speakers are perceived as fast speakers.

In this paper, we establish whether WK speakers do actually exhibit faster-than-average speech rate and higher phonological reduction in comparison to other dialects' speakers. We base our analysis on naturally occurring Kazakh conversations featuring 6 people, representing the three dialects spoken in Kazakhstan: Southern, North-Eastern, and Western.

We first analyze speech rate. We extracted the narrative portions of each conversation (2 minutes per speaker), counted the syllables produced by each speaker, and divided them by time (seconds). In terms of speech rate, the values for the Southern dialect speakers were found to be higher than other regions (5.67 syll/s for SK, 5.19 syll/s for WK, 4.58 syll/s for NEK). This analysis suggests that the language ideology has no support in the notion that the speech rate of WK speakers is faster than average.

We then consider whether WK speakers exhibit higher-than-average rates of phonological reduction in conversation. We restrict our focus to verbal constructions because they are an element that is often self-reported by speakers as being a main site for reduction. We are currently in the process of finalizing the analysis of the data for this portion of the study. Preliminary results suggest that WK speakers exhibit phonological reduction (final vowel drop and final consonant sonorization).

We complemented these results with the analysis of sociolinguistic interviews where we asked speakers how they perceived their speech to differ from that of speakers of other regions. In general, WK speakers were indicated to talk faster than average. We propose that, in iconicization process, participants have indexically ascribed to WK speakers personality features (“aggressiveness”, “harshness” and “rudeness”), explicitly linking these qualities to the supposed faster-than-average speech of WK speakers. The results from the quantitative analysis suggest that speech rate is not responsible for the perceived speed of WK speakers, but phonological reduction may play a role.