Abstract
Regional varieties of Danish are distinguished mainly by prosodic cues, in particular the tonal stress group pattern. We test the hypothesis that prosody is a strong cue for identifying the regional background of speakers. This hypothesis was studied using an online survey in which listeners were asked to identify the origin of speakers based on examples from four different regional varieties of Danish. Listeners identified speaker origin on the basis of both natural, monotonised and delexicalised speech samples. The results show that although most listeners are able to identify the four regional varieties correctly, it is more reasonable to say that Danes categorise the regional varieties into broader categories of Western and Eastern Danish. Prosody clearly plays an important role in the identification of the varieties, but reliable identification is difficult based on prosody alone.
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