Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm UniversityResultsCategorisation of the speakers into distinctpitch pattern typesThe results of our categorisation can be seen inTable 2. In the South Swedish varieties the fallpattern dominated (54 speakers), but the otherthree patterns were not uncommon with 25, 23and 17 speakers respectively. In the Gothenburgvariety, eleven speakers used the fall-riseintonation, and only one was classified as belongingto the level category. Ten Stockholmspeakers had produced the rise pattern, whiletwo speakers used the level pattern.Table 2. Results of the categorisation of the 142speakers into the four distinct categories fall, fallrise,rise and level along with their distributionacross the South Swedish, Gothenburg and Stockholmvarieties.Pattern South Sweden Gothenburg StockholmFall 54 0 0Fall-rise 17 11 0Rise 23 0 10Level 24 1 2Total 118 12 12Figure 4. Two typical pitch contours of the initialphrase Flyget, tåget och bilbranschen ‘Airlines,train companies and the automobile industry’ foreach of the four distinct pitch pattern types found inthe South Swedish varieties of this study: fall, fallrise,rise and level (solid line: female speaker;dashed line: male speaker).Geographical distributionFigure 5 shows the geographical distribution ofthe four patterns across varieties. Each pie chartin the figure represents the distribution of patternswithin one sub-variety. The southern andwestern varieties of South Swedish display amajority of the fall pattern, although other patternsare represented as well. In the northwesternvarieties, the fall pattern is much less common(only one speaker each in Ängelholm andsouthern Halland), while the fall-rise pattern –the most common one in the Gothenburg variety– is more frequent. Moreover, the level patternis also more common here than in the varietiesfurther to the south. The fall pattern isalso common in Kristianstad and in northeasternSkåne and western Blekinge. In these twovarieties the rise pattern – the category used bymost speakers in Stockholm – is also rathercommon. As already mentioned, no fall patternwas observed in the two reference varieties. InGothenburg the fall-rise pattern is used by allspeakers except one, while Stockholm displaysa vast majority of rise patterns and two levelones.45