The Sound Struture of the Dialect in Rödåliden : Auditory Analysis of the Phonemes of a Dialect in the North of Sweden in the early 2000s

This study investigates the sound structure of the dialect of the Rödåliden area in the province of Västerbotten in Northern Sweden. The aim is to describe the phonological system with a structural approach. The theoretical framework is based on the ideas that have developed from the Prague Linguistic Circle, where speech sounds are looked upon as functional units. One method used to determine phonemes is by way of commutation tests; another is the distribution method.The chief aim is to describe the phonemes of the Rödåliden dialect on the lexical level including prosodic features such as stress, tonal accent and quantity. The prosodic feature of short verbal phrases is also described. The material consists of words and phrases from a dictionary (not yet published) with more than 3 000 entries. The vocabulary in the dictionary was collected between 1988 and 2010 by a group of local people speaking the dialect. Thirteen informants have been interviewed and confronted with problems concerning phonological issues that are typical for the dialect in question. The study is based on auditory perception, i.e. the speakers’ idea of what is “right or wrong” or if there are alternative versions of a segment. The phonemes of the dialect are compared with the phonological system of standard Swedish. A thorough description of the phonology of the dialect is presented. Each phoneme is described as well as the most frequent allophones. Certain areas have been the focus of special interest. In standard Swedish as well as in the dialect the tonal accents acute (accent 1) and grave (accent 2) are used. In addition to these accent types, circumflex accent is used in the dialect. Circumflex is for example the only distinctive feature between the infinitive form [^fry:s] and the present tense form [fry:s] of the verb frys ‘to be cold’. The sequences ka- and ga- where /a/ is a front vowel reveal phonological distinction between velar k and g and palatal k and g, e.g. /kal:/ ‘old man’ ≠ /kal:/ ‘cold’ and /+gal:/ ‘was possible’ ≠ /gal:/ ‘infertile’. The cacuminal /ɽ/ and dental /l/ are in certain distributional contexts, e.g. after some long vowels, phonologically relevant. In other contexts, e.g. after short vowels, the different l-sounds are allophones due to complementary distribution. In standard Swedish the retroflex consonants (supradentals) are not considered to be phonematic but in the dialect in question they are phonologically relevant