Finnish accent easiest for Estonians to detect

For Estonian speakers, the Finnish accent is the easiest to recognize. In contrast, accents such as Lithuanian and Danish tend to be more challenging to identify. However, attitudes toward Estonian spoken with an accent depend on the listener's own foreign language background, according to a master's thesis from the University of Tartu.
When considering which foreign accent is the most recognizable in Estonian, Finnish or Russian likely come to mind first. These are, after all, the accents most frequently heard in Estonia. But how well do Estonians recognize less common accents, such as Japanese or Lithuanian? How do Estonians feel about speech with an accent and does an accent influence the impression a speaker makes on a listener? These were the questions explored by Avneet Sharma in a recently defended master's thesis at the University of Tartu's Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics.
According to the latest census, 17 percent of Estonia's population speaks Estonian as a foreign language. The number of native languages spoken in Estonia has also increased significantly over the past couple of decades, with 243 native languages now spoken in the country. For comparison, there were 109 languages recorded in 2000 and 157 in 2011. This indicates that native Estonian speakers are encountering Estonian spoken with a variety of foreign accents more frequently in their daily lives. As a result, attitudes toward accented speech are becoming increasingly important.
What is an accent?
An accent refers to a way of pronunciation, which can be present in both a speaker's native language and when speaking a foreign language. In the case of a native language, an accent may indicate the speaker's regional background or social affiliation, reflecting linguistic traits characteristic of a specific area or group.
A foreign language accent, however, is influenced by the speaker's native language and occurs when the speaker pronounces foreign sounds as if they were native ones. Additionally, a speaker might apply other pronunciation features typical of their native language, such as intonation, to the foreign language.
If certain sounds in the foreign language being learned do not exist in the speaker's native language, they are often substituted with the closest equivalents from their own language. For example, someone learning Estonian might replace the unique Estonian vowel "õ" with the more familiar "ö" or "o." In terms of Estonian pronunciation, vowels and word stress patterns are considered the most challenging for non-native speakers.
Foreign accents are, in one way or another, a part of everyday life, and listeners easily notice a speaker's accent. A person with a strong accent is generally more difficult to understand than someone who speaks without one. Moreover, listeners are often quick to form judgments about speakers with accents.
Previous studies have shown that foreign-language speakers with accents are often subject to stereotypes. They may be perceived as less friendly or, conversely, as more intelligent and educated.
While Estonians' attitudes toward foreign accents have not been specifically studied in detail, there has been considerable research into attitudes toward English spoken with an accent. For instance, studies comparing the attitudes of American English speakers toward different accents found that speakers with German and French accents were rated more positively than those with Arabic, Persian or Vietnamese accents. This suggests that accents carry varying levels of status.
The thesis
In his master's thesis, Avneet Sharma conducted an online survey in which native Estonian speakers evaluated sentences read aloud by 20 speakers of Estonian as a foreign language. These speakers represented ten different native languages, including geographically close languages (Finnish, Russian, Latvian, Swedish) and more distant ones (Lithuanian, Danish, German, French, Spanish, Japanese).
The sentences used in the study were sourced from the Estonian Accent Corpus, compiled by the Phonetics and Speech Technology Laboratory at Tallinn University of Technology's Cybernetics Institute between 2006 and 2012. This corpus contains speech samples from 162 speakers with 18 different native languages.
A total of 54 native Estonian speakers, aged 18-65, participated in the survey. Most respondents reported fluency in at least one foreign language, which they used daily. The most commonly mentioned languages were English, Russian, German and Finnish.
After listening to each sentence with a foreign accent, respondents were asked to evaluate various statements on a six-point scale. These statements assessed the comprehensibility of the speech, the speaker's language proficiency, the strength and disruptiveness of the accent and the speaker's perceived intelligence and friendliness. Respondents also rated how comfortable they would feel conversing with such a speaker.
Ability to speak a foreign language fosters understanding
The evaluations revealed varying attitudes toward different accents. For instance, the Finnish accent was rated as the easiest to understand and the least disruptive. Surprisingly, the Latvian accent was deemed the hardest to understand, while the Spanish accent was considered the strongest. The Russian accent ranked more neutrally across the different scales. In terms of perceived intelligence, friendliness and conversational comfort, however, all speakers were rated relatively similarly.
The assessments by Estonian-speaking listeners were influenced by both their own backgrounds and the speakers' characteristics. The number of languages a listener knew and used daily had the greatest impact: the more languages the listener spoke, the more positive their evaluations were, particularly regarding the speaker's language proficiency, the disruptiveness of the accent and conversational comfort.
This clearly suggests that individuals who speak or learn foreign languages themselves, or frequently interact with speakers of other languages, tend to be more open and understanding toward different accents in their native language. Additionally, listeners with higher levels of education were generally more tolerant of accents, finding them less disruptive.
On the other hand, the speakers' language proficiency also influenced listener attitudes. Speech samples from speakers with higher levels of Estonian proficiency were rated more positively than those from beginner-level speakers, whose accents were also perceived as stronger.
Danish accent not recognized
Listeners were asked to guess the native language of the speaker for each speech sample. The Finnish accent was by far the most accurately identified, with over half of the listeners recognizing it correctly. It was followed by the Russian, German and Spanish accents in terms of recognition.
The other accents, however, were much harder to place. The Lithuanian accent was correctly identified only once and was often mistaken for a Russian accent. The Danish accent was not recognized at all. Overall, the results showed that identifying accents proved to be a rather challenging task for the listeners.
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Editor: Airika Harrik, Marcus Turovski