Charlotte Gooskens
Biographic Data
| ID | 213846 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charlotte Gooskens |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charlotte |
| FAMILY NAME | Gooskens |
| SIGNATURE | GOOSKENS C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Groningen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0958-3682 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 60 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Assessing mutual intelligibility between Kurmanji and Zazaki spoken in Elazığ at text level
This study examines the mutual intelligibility between Kurmanji and Zazaki. The research area selected for this study is the province of Elâzığ, where both languages are spoken. Participants consist of middle and high school students aged between 14–19 from nine district centers where Kurmanji or Zazaki is spoken as native language. The study included a total of 243 participants, with 27 individuals selected from each district. The participants' …
Chinese “Dialects” and European “Languages
In this article, we tested some specific claims made in the literature on relative distances among European languages and among Chinese dialects, suggesting that some language varieties within the Sinitic family traditionally called dialects are, in fact, more linguistically distant from one another than some European varieties that are traditionally called languages. More generally, we examined whether distances among varieties within and across…
Regional background and donor-language fluency as predictors of Finnish loanword frequency in Finland-Swedish
Aims and objectives: This study examines fennicisms (i.e., Finnish loanwords and calques) in Finland-Swedish, a Swedish variety spoken in Finland. We investigate how fennicism frequency relates to speakers’ regional backgrounds and fluency in Finnish. Methodology: 134 participants from four regions in Finland performed a picture-naming task designed to elicit fennicisms. The participants also rated their own fluency in Finnish. Data and analysis:…
Errors or identity markers? A survey study on the use of and attitudes towards finlandisms and fennicisms in Finland Swedish
This study examines the use of and attitudes towards finlandisms and fennicisms in Finland Swedish. Finlandisms are words or structures typical of the Swedish variety spoken in Finland, while fennicisms are a category of finlandisms for which the source language is Finnish. Fennicisms are often discussed in context of Finnish influence and consequent Finland Swedish language loss, suggesting that the use of these features in Swedish is stigmatise…
Mutual intelligibility of a Kurmanji and a Zazaki dialect spoken in the province of Elazığ, Turkey
We present the first results of a large project concerned with the mutual intelligibility between Zazaki and Kurmanji dialects spoken in Eastern Anatolia. There is an ongoing debate on the classification of Kurmanji and Zazaki as separate languages or as dialects of the same language, Kurdish. However, there is no scientific study of how well speakers of Zazaki and other dialects of Kurdish can understand each other. In this paper, we present the…
Comparing Germanic, Romance and Slavic
Is Swedish more beautiful than Danish? Matched guise investigations with unknown languages
Are some languages universally seen as beautiful? And if so, what are the linguistic traits that make some languages sound more pleasing than others? This paper addresses these two questions. We do so with results from two listener experiments that use speech samples from a bilingual Danish–Swedish speaker in a matched guise test, where the listeners are ‘previously unexposed’ students from central China. Our results indicate that listeners from …
Online activation of L1 Danish orthography enhances spoken word recognition of Swedish
It has been reported that speakers of Danish understand more Swedish than vice versa. One reason for this asymmetry might be that spoken Swedish is closer to written Danish than vice versa. We hypothesise that literate speakers of Danish use their orthographic knowledge of Danish to decode spoken Swedish. To test this hypothesis, first-language (L1) Danish speakers were confronted with spoken Swedish in a translation task. Event-related brain pot…
The role of loanwords in the intelligibility of written Danish among Swedes
We investigated the intelligibility of written Danish for Swedes, and in particular the role of inherited words compared to non-Germanic loanwords. To assess whether shared loanwords are easier to understand than inherited words, we conducted two experiments. First, we tested the intelligibility of isolated Danish words (inherited words and loanwords) among Swedes. Second, we constructed two versions of a reading test, one with a large percentage…
Re-examining the /eː-ɛː/ merger in Finland-Swedish
This article examines regional and stylistic variation in the merger of front vowels /eː/ and /ɛː/ in Finland-Swedish. The study investigates the merger by comparing formant data from 141 speakers from four Swedish-speaking regions in Finland. Additionally, intraspeaker variation is explored by incorporating samples from three contextual styles. The results indicate cross-regional differences between Finland-Swedish dialects, with a more distinct…
Simultaneous bilingualism and speech style as predictors of variation in allophone production
This study investigates cross-linguistic transfer in the production of long mid front vowels [øː] and [œː] by simultaneous bilingual Finnish and Finland-Swedish speakers in Finland. In Swedish, the phoneme /ø/ can be realised as the allophones [ø] and [œ], while in Finnish, only [ø] is used. Combining approaches from sociophonetic and bilingual transfer research, the study used acoustic analysis to compare the height and fronting of [øː] and [œː]…
How well can intelligibility of closely related languages in Europe be predicted by linguistic and non-linguistic variables
We measured mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages in Europe. Intelligibility was determined for all 70 language combinations using the same uniform methodology (a cloze test). We analysed the results of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans from the same 16 countries. Lexical, phonological, orthographic, morphological and syntactic distances were computed as linguistic var…
Mapping the dimensions of linguistic distance
Linguistic and extra-linguistic predictors of mutual intelligibility between Germanic languages
We report on a large-scale investigation of the mutual intelligibility between five Germanic languages: Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish. We tested twenty language combinations using the same uniform methodology, making the results commensurable for the first time. We first tested both written and spoken language by means of cloze tests. Next we calculated linguistic distance at the levels of lexicon, orthography, phonology, morphology …
Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe
By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans from the same 16 countries where the test languages are spoken. Next, we present the data from a sub-gr…
Approaching micro-level planning from an intelligibility perspective
The Vanuatu government has recently implemented a policy of vernacular literacy. Children are now to receive the first three years of schooling in a vernacular language. Needless to say, in a country with less than 300,000 people [Vanuatu National Statistics Office 2016 Accessed January 4, 2016. http://vnso.gov.vu/] and more than 100 indigenous languages, some classrooms have more than one L1. In such cases, the language policy recommends that th…
Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages
In the present study we tested the level of mutual intelligibility between three West Slavic (Czech, Slovak and Polish) and three South Slavic languages (Croatian, Slovene and Bulgarian). Three different methods were used: a word translation task, a cloze test and a picture task. The results show that in most cases, a division between West and South Slavic languages does exist and that West Slavic languages are more intelligible among speakers of…
Mutual intelligibility of Dutch-German cognates by children
Several studies (e.g., Ház 2005) have found German to be easier to understand for Dutch listeners than Dutch for German listeners. This asymmetry has been attributed to the fact that German is an obligatory subject in Dutch secondary school and that many Dutch people watch German television. In contrast, it is much less common for German children to learn Dutch at school and for German people to watch Dutch television. It cannot be excluded, howe…
Introduction
Rough estimates of how many languages are spoken in the world today usually range between 6500 and 7000. The 2013 edition of the Ethnologue lists even 7106 living languages (Lewis et al. 2013). If speakers of different languages communicate with each other, they have to find a way of communicating across a linguistic border, and typologically speaking, with more than 7000 languages, there are currently more than 25 million linguistic borders in t…
Swedish is beautiful, Danish is ugly? Investigating the link between language attitudes and spoken word recognition
This paper investigates the hypothesis that attitudes towards a linguistic variety and intelligibility of that variety are linked. This is done by eliciting language attitudes and word recognition scores in 154 Danish and Swedish schoolchildren and adolescents between 7 and 16 years. Language attitudes towards the neighboring language are elicited by means of a matched-guise experiment while word recognition is tested by auditorily presenting the…
Modeling Intelligibility of Written Germanic Languages
We measured orthographic differences between five Germanic languages. First, we tested the hypothesis that orthographic stem variation among languages does not correlate with orthographic variation in inflectional affixes. We found this hypothesis true when considering the aggregated stem and affix distances between the languages. We also correlated the stem and affix distances within the cognate pairs in each language pair. We found low correlat…
The role of dialect exposure in receptive multilingualism
Previous investigations of inter-Scandinavian intelligibility have shown that, in general, Norwegians are better at understanding the closely related languages Danish and Swedish than Danes and Swedes are at understanding Norwegian. This asymmetry is often explained by the strong position that dialects hold in Norway as opposed to in Denmark and Sweden. In Norway, the general public is more exposed to language variation than in Sweden and Denmark…
Do speakers of Dutch use their knowledge of German while processing written Danish words
This paper elaborates on a factor that plays a role in receptive multilingualism, namely the influence of a second language (L2). We investigated whether knowledge of German can help Dutch people to decode written Danish words when they do not know any Danish. We instructed 32 participants with Dutch as a native language (L1) and different levels of proficiency in German as an L2 to translate 42 written Danish words into Dutch. The results showed…
Is diachronic lenition a factor in the asymmetry in intelligibility between Danish and Swedish
The influence of non-native morphosyntax on the intelligibility of a closely related language
Identification of Language Varieties
Three experiments are described investigating the role of different linguistic levels in the identification of language varieties. The results reveal that prosodic features play a minor role in the identification of language varieties, both in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands. The role of pronunciation varies. In some cases, pronunciation alone leads to better identification than cues at all linguistic levels, including pronunciation. Fu…
Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe
By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans from the same 16 countries where the test languages are spoken. Next, we present the data from a sub-gr…
The Contribution of Linguistic Factors to the Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages
The three mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) are so closely related that the speakers mostly communicate in their own languages (semicommunication). Even though the three West Germanic languages Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans are also closely related, semicommunication is not usual between these languages. In the present investigation, results from intelligibility tests measuring the mutual intelligibility of Danish, No…
Perceptive evaluation of Levenshtein dialect distance measurements using Norwegian dialect data
The Levenshtein dialect distance method has proven to be a successful method for measuring phonetic distances between Dutch dialects. The aim of the present investigation is to validate the Levenshtein dialect distance with perceptual data from a language area other than the Dutch, namely Norway. We calculate the correlation between the Levenshtein distances and the distances between 15 Norwegian dialects as judged by Norwegian listeners. We carr…
Swedish is beautiful, Danish is ugly? Investigating the link between language attitudes and spoken word recognition
This paper investigates the hypothesis that attitudes towards a linguistic variety and intelligibility of that variety are linked. This is done by eliciting language attitudes and word recognition scores in 154 Danish and Swedish schoolchildren and adolescents between 7 and 16 years. Language attitudes towards the neighboring language are elicited by means of a matched-guise experiment while word recognition is tested by auditorily presenting the…
Comparing Germanic, Romance and Slavic
Mapping the dimensions of linguistic distance
Approaching micro-level planning from an intelligibility perspective
The Vanuatu government has recently implemented a policy of vernacular literacy. Children are now to receive the first three years of schooling in a vernacular language. Needless to say, in a country with less than 300,000 people [Vanuatu National Statistics Office 2016 Accessed January 4, 2016. http://vnso.gov.vu/] and more than 100 indigenous languages, some classrooms have more than one L1. In such cases, the language policy recommends that th…
The influence of non-native morphosyntax on the intelligibility of a closely related language
Identification of Language Varieties
Three experiments are described investigating the role of different linguistic levels in the identification of language varieties. The results reveal that prosodic features play a minor role in the identification of language varieties, both in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands. The role of pronunciation varies. In some cases, pronunciation alone leads to better identification than cues at all linguistic levels, including pronunciation. Fu…
Perceptive evaluation of Levenshtein dialect distance measurements using Norwegian dialect data
The Levenshtein dialect distance method has proven to be a successful method for measuring phonetic distances between Dutch dialects. The aim of the present investigation is to validate the Levenshtein dialect distance with perceptual data from a language area other than the Dutch, namely Norway. We calculate the correlation between the Levenshtein distances and the distances between 15 Norwegian dialects as judged by Norwegian listeners. We carr…
Travel time as a predictor of linguistic distance
The aim of the present investigation 1 was to get an impression of the geographic influences on the dialectal variation in a country. In previous investigations, the correlations between linguistic distances and geographic distances using dialect data from the Netherlands and Norway were calculated (Gooskens and Heeringa 2004, Nerbonne et al. 1996). The results showed a high correlation in the case of Dutch data while the correlation was consider…
How well can Norwegians identify their dialects
The aim of the present study is twofold. First, it addresses the question of how well Norwegians are able to identify Norwegian dialects. Second, it investigates the role which intonation plays in the identification of Norwegian dialects. In a number of listening experiments, 15 groups of young Norwegians from different parts of Norway were asked to identify 15 different dialects. The dialects were presented in the original form as well as in a v…
How easy is it for speakers of Dutch to understand Frisian and Afrikaans, and why
Preview this article: How easy is it for speakers of Dutch to understand Frisian and Afrikaans, and why?, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/avt.22.04bez-1.gif
Linguistic and extra-linguistic predictors of inter-Scandinavian intelligibility
Preview this article: Linguistic and extra-linguistic predictors of inter-Scandinavian intelligibility, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/avt.23.12goo-1.gif
The Contribution of Linguistic Factors to the Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages
The three mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) are so closely related that the speakers mostly communicate in their own languages (semicommunication). Even though the three West Germanic languages Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans are also closely related, semicommunication is not usual between these languages. In the present investigation, results from intelligibility tests measuring the mutual intelligibility of Danish, No…
Predicting intelligibility and perceived linguistic distance by means of the Levenshtein algorithm
In this article, we investigate the predictive value of so-called Levenshtein distances for both intelligibility scores and perceived linguistic distances. Additionally, we compare two measuring methods, namely normalised and non-normalised Levenshtein distances. The Levenshtein algorithm is a string edit distance measure that quantifies the distance between the pronunciations of corresponding words in different dialects or closely related langua…
Syllable reduction and articulation rates in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish
This investigation compares articulation rates of phonological and phonetic syllables in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish to investigate differences in degrees of syllable deletion (reduction) among these three languages. For the investigation two sets of data are used: one consisting of recorded speech from radio news and another consisting of sentences read aloud. The results of the comparative investigation show that in both data sets Danish exhi…
The role of extra-linguistic factors in receptive bilingualism
Danish and Swedish are closely related languages that are generally mutually intelligible. Previous research has shown, however, that Danes comprehend more spoken Swedish than vice versa. It has been suggested that this asymmetry is caused by extra-linguistic factors such as literacy, contact with, and attitudes held towards the test language. However, also linguistic factors, such as supra-segmental features or differences in speech rate, could …
New horizons in sociophonetic variation and change
Do speakers of Dutch use their knowledge of German while processing written Danish words
This paper elaborates on a factor that plays a role in receptive multilingualism, namely the influence of a second language (L2). We investigated whether knowledge of German can help Dutch people to decode written Danish words when they do not know any Danish. We instructed 32 participants with Dutch as a native language (L1) and different levels of proficiency in German as an L2 to translate 42 written Danish words into Dutch. The results showed…
Is diachronic lenition a factor in the asymmetry in intelligibility between Danish and Swedish
The influence of non-native morphosyntax on the intelligibility of a closely related language
Modeling Intelligibility of Written Germanic Languages
We measured orthographic differences between five Germanic languages. First, we tested the hypothesis that orthographic stem variation among languages does not correlate with orthographic variation in inflectional affixes. We found this hypothesis true when considering the aggregated stem and affix distances between the languages. We also correlated the stem and affix distances within the cognate pairs in each language pair. We found low correlat…
The role of dialect exposure in receptive multilingualism
Previous investigations of inter-Scandinavian intelligibility have shown that, in general, Norwegians are better at understanding the closely related languages Danish and Swedish than Danes and Swedes are at understanding Norwegian. This asymmetry is often explained by the strong position that dialects hold in Norway as opposed to in Denmark and Sweden. In Norway, the general public is more exposed to language variation than in Sweden and Denmark…
Mutual intelligibility between West and South Slavic languages
In the present study we tested the level of mutual intelligibility between three West Slavic (Czech, Slovak and Polish) and three South Slavic languages (Croatian, Slovene and Bulgarian). Three different methods were used: a word translation task, a cloze test and a picture task. The results show that in most cases, a division between West and South Slavic languages does exist and that West Slavic languages are more intelligible among speakers of…
Mutual intelligibility of Dutch-German cognates by children
Several studies (e.g., Ház 2005) have found German to be easier to understand for Dutch listeners than Dutch for German listeners. This asymmetry has been attributed to the fact that German is an obligatory subject in Dutch secondary school and that many Dutch people watch German television. In contrast, it is much less common for German children to learn Dutch at school and for German people to watch Dutch television. It cannot be excluded, howe…
Introduction
Rough estimates of how many languages are spoken in the world today usually range between 6500 and 7000. The 2013 edition of the Ethnologue lists even 7106 living languages (Lewis et al. 2013). If speakers of different languages communicate with each other, they have to find a way of communicating across a linguistic border, and typologically speaking, with more than 7000 languages, there are currently more than 25 million linguistic borders in t…
Swedish is beautiful, Danish is ugly? Investigating the link between language attitudes and spoken word recognition
This paper investigates the hypothesis that attitudes towards a linguistic variety and intelligibility of that variety are linked. This is done by eliciting language attitudes and word recognition scores in 154 Danish and Swedish schoolchildren and adolescents between 7 and 16 years. Language attitudes towards the neighboring language are elicited by means of a matched-guise experiment while word recognition is tested by auditorily presenting the…
Linguistic and extra-linguistic predictors of mutual intelligibility between Germanic languages
We report on a large-scale investigation of the mutual intelligibility between five Germanic languages: Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish. We tested twenty language combinations using the same uniform methodology, making the results commensurable for the first time. We first tested both written and spoken language by means of cloze tests. Next we calculated linguistic distance at the levels of lexicon, orthography, phonology, morphology …
Mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in Europe
By means of a large-scale web-based investigation, we established the degree of mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages within the Germanic, Slavic and Romance language families in Europe. We first present the results of a selection of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans from the same 16 countries where the test languages are spoken. Next, we present the data from a sub-gr…
Approaching micro-level planning from an intelligibility perspective
The Vanuatu government has recently implemented a policy of vernacular literacy. Children are now to receive the first three years of schooling in a vernacular language. Needless to say, in a country with less than 300,000 people [Vanuatu National Statistics Office 2016 Accessed January 4, 2016. http://vnso.gov.vu/] and more than 100 indigenous languages, some classrooms have more than one L1. In such cases, the language policy recommends that th…
How well can intelligibility of closely related languages in Europe be predicted by linguistic and non-linguistic variables
We measured mutual intelligibility of 16 closely related spoken languages in Europe. Intelligibility was determined for all 70 language combinations using the same uniform methodology (a cloze test). We analysed the results of 1833 listeners representing the mutual intelligibility between young, educated Europeans from the same 16 countries. Lexical, phonological, orthographic, morphological and syntactic distances were computed as linguistic var…
Mapping the dimensions of linguistic distance
Linguistics (34 works) · Psychology (26 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (16 works) · Danish (10 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (10 works) · History (8 works) · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity (7 works)