The UK is facing important changes in the near future, with Brexit, i.e. the UK leaving the European Union (EU), looming ever more closely on the horizon. These important political and economic changes will certainly have an influence on Europe as a whole, and have had linguistic consequences for the English language, such as Brexit-related neologisms (Lalić-Krstin & Silaški, 2018). As Modiano (2017a) suggests, Brexit might also have an influence on the status of the English language in the EU, in particular with regard to the dominance of native speaker varieties. In this article, we discuss the possibility of the use of a neutral European English variety in the EFL classrooms of two EU member states, i.e. Sweden and Germany. Based on a survey among 80 practitioners in secondary schools (first results were presented in Forsberg, Mohr & Jansen, 2019), the study investigates attitudes towards target varieties of English in general, and European English or ‘Euro-English’ (cf. Jenkins, Modiano & Seidlhofer, 2001; Modiano 2003) in particular, after the referendum in June 2016.

Standard language cultures are characterised by beliefs in idealised standard forms of the language in question. In this paper, these beliefs are connected to the concepts of referee design and speech community, through analysis of how Swedish adolescents reflect upon and self-assess their language proficiencies. The data consist of interviews where 111 participants self-assess their Swedish, English and additional home languages. During the self-assessment, participants use different points of reference when reflecting on the different languages in their repertoires. Four main categories of answers are found, all relating to an absent referee in some manner: the participants’ evaluations of other people’s language proficiency compared to their own; their proficiency in other languages; their evaluation of their proficiency in relation to formal grading and feedback given in school; and their own experiences of their limitations and abilities in different situations. When assessing Swedish, participants display attitudes towards ‘good’ and ‘bad’ language and contextualise their proficiency in a way that focuses on standard language ideologies and their speech community. The same pattern does not occur when participants reflect on their other languages, indicating the important role that the peer group and speech community have in creating and facilitating these ideologies.

Background/Aims:

This study investigates a possible merger in the early stages between /i:/ and /y:/ among young speakers in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Methods:

(1) A large-scale online perception experiment testing listeners’ abilities to identify the two vowels and (2) acoustic analysis of 705 vowels from 19 speakers. 

Results:

The perception study shows that listeners classify the horizontally centralized /y:/ as /i:/, both in isolated vowel items and in items containing the full word. This indicates that /y:/ is moving into the perceptual space of /i:/. Listeners also classify the unmerged /y:/ as /i:/ when listening to [y:] in isolation, indicating that lip rounding is a perceptually weak feature, for this centralized vowel, in this variety. The acoustic analysis shows that /i:/ tends to be produced as [ɨ:], and that there is no acoustic difference between /i:/ and /y:/ in measurements correlated with the first two formants, i.e. lip rounding is the most important distinctive feature.

Conclusion:

Results point in the direction of an incipient vowel merger, following a merger-by-approximation model. These results indicate a lack of perceptual strength of an articulatory feature in the disappearing phoneme, namely lip rounding, and the consequent perceptual similarities between the horizontally centralized [ɨ:] and /y:/.