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Kristiansen, T., & Grondelaers, S. 2013. Introduction to Language (De)standardisation in Late Modern Europe: Experimental Studies. Oslo:Novus. Standard Language Ideology in Contemporary Europe vol. 2

It is a common finding in language attitude studies that listeners downgrade non-standard accents and even the use of specific non-standard phonetic features (Campbell-Kibler 2008) in speaker evaluation experiments. This has certainly been the prevalent pattern found for Danish (Kristiansen & Grondelaers 2013). In this study, we examine how a non-standard phonetic feature of Danish affects evaluations when it is used together with words from the high status repertoire of academic terminology. The study is part of a larger project investigating the connections between standard language and social mobility. As part of this project, other members of the research team have found that the use of academic terminology is overtly evaluated as prestigious by teachers and career counsellors at institutions of higher learning (Ag & Quist submitted). Here, we build on this finding to ask whether a non-standard phonetic feature in combination with different choices of lexis can affect listeners’ attitudes.
We used a variation of the Implicit Association Task (Greenwald et al 1998) with auditory stimuli which was administered online. In this design, auditory stimuli produced by two bi-dialectal female speakers of the non-standard Falster variety and the standard Eastern Danish variety were used as targets to be classified together with the attributive dimension of competence, represented by written words. In addition to presence (in Eastern Danish) and absence (in Falster Danish) of ‘stød’, the stimuli for the target dimension also varied with respect to lexis: half of them constituted academic terms that had been classified as prestigious in the interviews with teachers and career counsellors, and the other half were frequency and duration matched non-academic words. Thus, the design tests how lexis from the academic repertoire may affect the evaluation of the non-standard phonetic feature of absent stød.
72 students from a teacher training college about 80 miles south of Copenhagen participated in the study. All participants live and study in this area where the standard Eastern Danish variety is used alongside with the local non-standard Falster variety. The average d’ score was 0.43, which can be interpreted as an indication that listeners on average show a moderate association between standard pronunciation and the positive pole of the attributive dimension of competence. This is what we might expect on the basis of previous matched guise speaker evaluation experiments of regional varieties of Danish. Comparing the d’ scores based on academic terms and non-academic terms, we find no statistically significant effect of the type of word (p = 0.85). This result shows that the overtly prestigious academic terms do not change the implicit associations held by the listeners between competence and variety. In other words, choosing to use prestigious terminology will not lead people to think more highly of speakers with a non-standard accent. In the paper we will discuss to what extent this may be an effect of the listeners’ backgrounds and the choice of linguistic variables.