Human Recognition of Swedish Dialects

Our recent work within the research project SIMULEKT (Simulating Intonational Varieties of Swedish) involves a pilot perception test, used for detecting tendencies in human clustering of Swedish dialects. 30 Swedish listeners were asked to identify the geographical origin of 72 Swedish native speakers by clicking on a map of Sweden. Results indicate for example that listeners from the south of Sweden are generally better at recognizing some major Swedish dialects than listeners from the central part of Sweden.