Sociophonetics of [r] in Akan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study interrogates what has hitherto been called ‘free variation’ in Akan (cf. Schachter and Fromkin (1968), Dolphyne (1988), and Abakah (2004)), i.e., the alternation of [r], [l] and [d] in intervocalic position (V_V) and the alternation of [r] and [l] at the second consonant (C2) position of a CCV syllable structure in various dialects of the language. The study follows the quantitative sociolinguistic approach pioneered by Labov (1966) to investigate the extent to which the choice of one rather than the other of these sounds is not free but is dependent on the social backgrounds of speakers (described in terms of their age, gender, educational background and what dialect of Akan they speak). Interview and picture elicitation were the primary instruments of collecting data from 120 respondents (60 speakers of Asante and Fante respectively). The study did not uncover any major dialectal difference in the alternation between [r] and [l] but finds that [d] is decidedly an Asante variant that competes with the other two sounds in the speech of adults. The data however shows that the social variables age, level of education, and gender do influence the choice of [r] versus [l] in both Asante and Fante. Young, educated speakers, especially female speakers, demonstrated a higher tendency of using the [r] variant, which seems to have emerged as the most prestigious of the three variants.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".