Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics (Cognitive Linguistic Research)

254 Gitte Kristiansen

Table 25. Subjective awareness of linguistic features: qualitative and quantitative
overview (tokens)

Accent Nature of type mentioned and number of token

Andalucía 32 /s/, 2 aspiration of /x/ in <j>

Galicia 4 /s/, 10 intonation patterns

Canarias 14 /s/, 2 /x/, 1 /t/

Argentina 11 / sibilants: /s/ and affricate <y>, 1 /r/, 1 intonation

Mexico 11 /s/, 2 /r/

France 9 /r/, 3 /s/, 1 <g>, 1 /t/

Germany 5 /r/, 1 <j>, 1 <g>

Br. Eng. 7 /r/, 3 /Ɵ/ B/s/, 2 /t/, 3 /g/, 2 /o/

Am. Eng. 5 /r/, 2 /s/

Table 26. Subjective awareness of linguistic features: quantitative overview (types)

Distinctive

features

Exclusive

features

Frequent

features

Linguistic

awareness

Social

awareness

Andalucía 4 1 2 3

Galicia 3 1 2 2

Canarias 4 1 2 3

Argentina 3 1 1 3

Mexico 2 1 1 2

France 4 1 3 4

Germany 3 0 3 3

Br. Eng. 4 1 3 5

Am. Eng. 3 1 3 2

In the case of British English, a total of 17 children comment on 5 different
variables. In our ranking of successful identification we separated the re-
sults for British and American English, but it must not be forgotten that
these are ultimately two varieties of the same language and that as we saw
in Table 18, in the oldest age group 14 out of 50 identified American Eng-
lish correctly and 16 thought is was a British English accent. 60 percent
thus knew that the lects were English. Out of the remaining 20 listeners, 9
children believed it was German and only a few subjects attributed the
speech to a “southern” origin (France, Argentina, Mexico). It is thus only if
we keep the English varieties separately that France and Germany fare
slightly better in spite of there being fewer comments and fewer variables