New Orleans English (NOE) demonstrates a distinctive combination of NYC-linked and South-linked linguistic features. In a matched guise dialect classification task, listeners were presented with NOE audio featuring either only NYC-linked features, only South-linked features, or a combination of the two, and asked to identify where the speaker was from. When faced with only NYC-linked features or only South-linked features, listeners consistently identified the speaker as being from the targeted locale and accessed associated social stereotypes—suggesting that, in isolation, these NOE features are indeed perceived as being linked to NYC and the South, respectively. When presented with conflicting linguistic cues, listeners enacted several strategies: “settling” on a geographic identification aligned with one or more of the linguistic cues and ignoring incongruent cues, shifting the geographic location to a middle-ground between these North/South poles, or compromising between sociolinguistic aspects of two locations to “find” a persona that fits with both signals.

We present and evaluate the map-based accent-recognition task, in which listeners place speech fragments of regionally accented Netherlandic Standard Dutch on a map in a browser-based experiment. On the basis of 15,780 accent placements (from 1,578 participants), we demonstrate that this task successfully elicits listener associations between speech and space, which are mediated by listeners’ sociolinguistic representations. We subsequently assess the task’s validity by comparing the listeners’ map-based associations with objective dialectological distances: results show a significant correlation between production and perception and hence establish convergent validity. Finally, we use a hierarchical cluster analysis to map out listeners’ perceptual isoglosses. These reveal that the accent placements largely clustered along the province boundaries, but with dialectologically motivated deviations and subcategorizations. We discuss methodological implications for perceptual dialectology and sociolinguistic implications for Dutch.