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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 835

Part of Session 165: Language, Place and Identity (Other abstracts in this session)

Moving to the city – language change in real time

Authors: Monka, Malene
Submitted by: Monka, Malene (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Mobility – both geographically and socially – is becoming more and more widespread in late modernity (Adey 2009). In sociolinguistics social and geographical mobility have always been considered very influential to both dialect levelling and language change at large (Labov 1966, 1967, 2001, Chambers 2002). There have been a rather small number of studies (e.g. Bowie 2000, Omdal 1994, Andersson & Thelander 1994), which – with a few exceptions – have been synchronic (Mees & Collins 1999, Auer et al. 2000). However, social and geographical mobility still needs further attention within sociolinguistics.

This paper reports on a real time panel study of the effect of social and geographic mobility on language change. It examines the language change of 24 speakers from three towns in old and new recordings (1978 and 2008) and focuses on six informants – one man and one woman from each town – who moved to Copenhagen for educational purposes between the two recordings.

Quantitative analyses of morphological and phonological variables show significant language change between the two data sets. However, the change is not found in the language of the mobile informants  – as one might expect. It is first and foremost the non-mobile group who has changed linguistically. As some synchronic studies (e.g. Bowie 2000, Omdal 1994) suspect but have no possibility of testing, it turns out that the mobile informants already distinguished themselves linguistically as children as they used fewer dialect features than their non-mobile peers, i.e. the starting point of the mobile informants was closer to standard. The analyses show that the language of the six mobile informants change in different ways, and the quantitative results suggest a connection between the language use and the hometown of the informants. Processes of dialect levelling have set in at different times in the three towns, and this is mirrored in the language of the mobile informants.

The quantitative results trigger the need for qualitative analyses that gives special attention to ‘place’ and ‘sense of belonging’ (Quist 2010, Johnstone 2010), i.e. to the mobile informants’ image of Copenhagen and their hometown, respectively. The image of Copenhagen was quite similar. When moving to Copenhagen all the informants perceived it as a “big” and “chaotic” city but soon it changed from being an unknown ‘space’ into ‘place’ and their “home” (Cresswell 2004). However, the informants’ images of their hometowns differ and this seems to play an important role for their linguistic strategy. A strong ‘sense of belonging’ to a ‘place’ (the hometown) implies awareness of the language of the ‘place’ and affects the informant’s language use. If the informants’ perceive their hometown and it’s dialect positively, this is reflected in their identity constructions, which again is mirrored in their language use.