Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1218

Part of Session 149: Interactional Dialectology (Other abstracts in this session)

Social value ascriptions to levelled dialect features among youth

Authors: Schøning, Signe Wedel
Submitted by: Schøning, Signe Wedel (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Social value ascriptions to levelled dialect features among youth

Signe Wedel Schøning, sws@hum.ku.dk
University of Copenhagen

The Danish speech community is predominantly standardised, and a recent real-time study (Schøning & Pedersen 2009, also Schøning 2010) illustrates a dialect levelling process in which adolescents only occasionally use traditional dialect features. Nonetheless, despite no longer being the default language variety among youth, the dialect features are ascribed significant social values (Agha 2007), denoting social norms and structures. Speakers` knowledge and orientation towards these ascriptions function as meaning potential, exploitable in social identity work (Blommaert 2005, Zimmerman 1998). This aspect of linguistic practices, however, goes unnoticed by traditional dialectology and descriptive sociolinguistics.

In this presentation I demonstrate how the inclusion of interactional sociolinguistic (Rampton 2006, 2009, 2011) to traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics helps elucidate the use and symbolic meaning of traditional dialect features among Standard-speaking Danish adolescents in two peripheral areas in the Western part of Denmark.

This is illustrated by data from a project on the use of dialect features as identity and stylisation practices (Schøning 2010) and by data from my ongoing PhD project on poly-lingual practices (Jørgensen 2010, Møller 2009), including dialectal practices, and place. The data consist of self-recordings made by 13-17 year-olds. I show sequentially based microanalyses of dialect use which suggest that adolescents ascribe social values relating to place, gender, especially masculinity, and age to traditional dialect features in stylisation processes (Coupland 2007). I propose how the linguistic practices of the adolescents` use of traditional dialect features may be considered a poly-lingual practice in line with their use of other linguistic features not associated with the local place, such as English. This perspective helps explain the use of dialect features among standard speaking Danes.

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Coupland, N. (2007): Style. Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Jørgensen, J.N. (2010): Languaging. Nine years of poly-lingual development of Turkish-Danish grade school students. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, The Køge Series. Copenhagen: Copenhagen University
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Rampton, B. (2011):
Schøning, S. (2010): Dialekt som identitets- og stiliseringspraksisser hos et søskendepar. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, 54. Copenhagen: Copenhagen University
Schøning, S. & I.L. Pedersen (2009): Vinderup in Real Time – a Showcase of Dialect Levelling. In Current Issues in linguistic theory 4,308, pp. 233-244
Zimmerman, D.H. (1998): Identity, Context and Interaction. In Antaki, C. & S. Widdicombe (eds.): Identities in Talk. London: Sage, pp. 87-106

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Social value ascriptions to levelled dialect features among youth