[Somean] Friday: Nicolai Pharao

[Kathryn Campbell-Kibler]

Hey So Meaners!

This Friday Nicolai will talk to us about the plans he's been developing 
while here to use the IAT technique to look at stylistic clustering in 
Danish.  A relevant abstract is below.  We'll also talk about what we want 
to do this quarter.

-K

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Exploring the social meanings of Copenhagen Danish /s/

Tore Kristiansen, Marie Maegaard, Janus Møller & Nicolai Pharao, LANCHART, 
University of

Copenhagen, Denmark (correspondence to: Nicolai Pharao, 
nicolaip at hum.ku.dk)

In Copenhagen Danish, the standard articulation of /s/ has an alveolar 
place of articulation, alongside the less common fronted variant, [s+]. 
The fronted variant is associated with female speech in popular discourse. 
This association is supported by research that shows that the use of the 
fronted variant is strongly connected to female speakers. However, a 
recent investigation of Copenhagen Danish (Maegaard (2007)) has shown that 
the fronted variant is also common in male speech in a speech style 
associated with young speakers in culturally and ethnically heterogeneous 
environments, henceforth Urban Youth Style (Møller (2009)). Whereas the 
presence of fronted [s+] in male speech in other speech styles is often 
associated with gayness, it is unknown whether this association is also 
made when the variant occurs in a sample of the Urban Youth Style. This 
opens up for the possibility that the social meaning potentials of the 
fronted variant may vary partly as a function of the stylistic context in 
which it occurs, despite the strong connection to gender at the 
macro-level of social meaning.

In the present study, we carry out a controlled manipulation of the 
(s)-variable in order to examine the role of context and listener. Samples 
of Copenhagen male speech are manipulated using cross-splicing of 
spontaneously occurring tokens. This generates samples containing only 
alveolar variants of (s) and samples containing only fronted variants. 
Using an open questionnaire format we ask whether samples containing the 
fronted variant are classified differently than samples containing the 
standard variant, and whether the effect is different as a function of 
accent (cf. Campbell-Kibler (2007)). Furthermore, we use different 
listener groups in order to examine the role of the listener in ascription 
of social meaning. By using teenagers from more or less culturally and 
ethnically heterogeneous environments, and by comparing responses from 
teenagers who self report to be speakers of the Urban Youth Style and 
teenagers who do not, we aim to investigate the effect of group membership 
and accent on linguistic perception and attitudes.

References:

Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn (2007) “Accent, (ING), and the social logic of 
listener perceptions” American speech 82,1, pp. 32-64

Maegard, Marie (2007) Udtalevariation og –forandring i københavnsk, danske 
talesprog 8, C.A. Reitzel, Copenhagen, Denmark

Møller, Janus (2009) “Stereotyping categorisations of speech styles among 
linguistic minority Danis in Køge” in Maegaard, Gregersen, Quist & 
Jørgensen (eds.) Language, attitudes, standardization and language change. 
Novus: Oslo. pp. 231 – 254.