Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands (henceforth ABN) is a term used generally in the Netherlands by linguists and laymen alike to refer to the country's prestige dialect; a literal translation would be ‘General Refined Dutch’. Though ABN is a dialect rather than an accent (Wells, 1970:231), its status is comparable to that of the RP accent of English since it is essentially a social variety only loosely associated with a particular geographical area. ABN speakers are to be found in greatest numbers throughout the Western provinces (i.e. Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland and Utrecht) and particularly in the annular Randstad conurbation linking the towns of Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht; but ABN is to be heard from the upper socio-economic classes all over the Netherlands, and is also looked to as a standard in the Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium.

This article deals with auditory speaker recognition, the human ability to recognize a speaker's identity from hearing a sample of his speech. More specifically, it concentrates on our ability to do this in everyday situations, not in the experimental laboratory. As is explained more fully by Brown (1980a), there are significant differences between the speaker recognition tasks which experimenters have set listeners to perform and the corresponding processes which we perform in our daily lives. In addition, therefore, the article does not handle two experimental fields which are often considered together with auditory speaker recognition—speaker recognition by the visual examination of spectrograms (‘voice-prints’), and automatic speaker recognition by machine.

The term ‘modern standard Cantonese’ (hereafter referred to as MSC) as used in this paper refers to the language spoken by the majority of people in Guangzhou (Canton) and in nearby places such as Macau and Hong Kong. It is well known that many varieties (or sub-dialects) of Cantonese are found in the various counties and districts of the Guangdong (Kwantung) province. The sub-dialect under discussion (hereafter referred to as XSD) is spoken in a village called Xiantang (‘fairy pond’) in the commune of Longjiang of the Shunde county. This paper is based on field work done during a visit to the village and material gathered from interviews with informants in Guangzhou and Hong Kong. As a speaker of MSC trying to communicate with speakers of XSD I found that the main obstacle to intelligibility is the fact that certain phonological oppositions in MSC do not exist in XSD. Once this hurdle is cleared there is not much communication problem. I have decided to use MSC as a sort of basis in this purely synchronic study mainly because it would facilitate discussion, as a lot of work has been done on this dialect already.

The following account of Hull intonation uses the terminology of O'Connor and Arnold (1961 and 1973) in its formal description of intonation patterns and Halliday's (1967) theoretical framework in its discussion of the usage of such patterns. The analysis is based on recordings of the speech of a working-class native of Hull and the main findings have been checked by reference to a second speaker of the same dialect.

1.0 In the process of linguistic borrowing, when the model (the foreign word in the donor language) turns into the replica (the loanword in the borrowing language), adaptation takes place on several levels, and it proceeds according to the principles of languages in contact. In the course of this adaptation two basic laws operate: substitution and importation. The first law regulates the replacement of donor-language phonemes and morphemes which occur in the model by phonemes and morphemes of the borrowing language. Thus substitution takes place at the phonological and at the morphological level and may take several forms, depending on the nature and type of replacement.

Matthews (1981) offers several criticisms of an earlier article of mine, ‘The second Great Vowel Shift?’ (Bauer, 1979). Some of these criticisms appear to arise from a misunderstanding of my original article that is entirely due to my own imprecise formulations. I should therefore like to set the record straight, and also to raise a methodological problem implicit in Matthews's criticisms.