Changing Pronunciation but Stable Social Evaluation?

The study of phonetic variation and change in sociolinguistics predominantly focuses on ‘the vernacular’ or at least on speech occurring in spontaneous conversations. While such studies are obviously vital to understand the patterns of change in a speech community, it is also desirable to understand how patterns of variation and change develop in a ‘prestige’ standard language which may function as a model for normative language. In order to study on-going sound change in standard spoken Danish and their socio-linguistic consequences, the paper investigates the production of a series of front vowels in the news broadcasts of the national Danish radio, DR, arguably the model for the ‘best’ language to the majority of speakers of Danish. The study focuses on changes in the production of two vowel variables, the short (a) and long (æ:), by studying their position in the vowel space relative to neighboring vowels as well as relating these results to the realization of (a) and (æ:) as observed in sociolinguistic interviews. These variables are of particular interest because they have been discussed as emblematic of substandard pronunciation for generations, and because the social evaluation of the raised variants may be changing considerably in the present

American Studies in Scandinavia, 54:1

Anders Bo Rasmussen et al

“Organically German”?:Changing ideologies of national belonging

This chapter examines variation in the situated meanings of the term Biodeutsche(r), a term which has emerged relatively recently as a way to refer to people who are German by descent (i.e., not of migration background). This analysis shows that use of this term reflects competing discourses about the role of ethnicity in national belonging in Germany. While the origin and many uses of the term challenge the validity of ethnicity as a basis for legitimacy in German society, some of the data suggest that it has also been adopted as a supposedly neutral term to describe a segment of the German population, which supports an ethnonational ideology