The perception of high frequency sibilants in Hungarian male speech

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to report on an experiment designed to evaluate the perception of high frequency sibilant articulations in Hungarian male speech and to theorise on the results. The main findings of the experiment are that the Hungarian listeners rate high frequency sibilants with femininity. These findings suggest that there is at least some social awareness of sibilant frequency in Hungarian. What follows from this is, in turn, that the sociolinguistic salience of sibilants as a variable is not confined to dialects of English, where the phenomenon has been most thoroughly described and discussed.