Summary
The DNRF LANCHART Centre plans to continue both strands of studying patterns of language
variation and change and evaluations of language variation. We will increase the collaboration
between research groups to analyze the link between production and perception of variation.
Studies will address basic concerns in sociolinguistic theory and methodology, and will broaden the
scope of the work in the direction of frameworks in general linguistics, both with respect to
functional and formal approaches.
We will expand the corpus so that we can contrast spoken and written language directly. This
expansion will also allow us to continue the tradition of training new researchers. New students will
be trained in all steps of the process from generating an idea to collecting the data, analyzing the
patterns and writing up the results.
Our new empirical project, the Bornholm study, draws on a range of the methods of collecting data
on speech production and language attitudes developed by the center.
Research plan 2013-2015
1. Introduction
We build on two observations.
Firstly, we have diagnosed a demand for theoretical innovations and an even larger need for
theoretical integration within the vast area of spoken-language research. Disciplines have multiplied
at surprising rates while the basic theoretical premises stand in need of restructuring, or even
complete rethinking. Furthermore, the integration of theoretical thinking and methodological
practice needs a second look.
Secondly, we have built a vast data base of spoken Danish which is at once structured and
searchable. This fact alone is essential for the success of our research, but we have to expand the
data base so that it will function on a par with data bases for written language.
2. Studies in the theory and methodology of sociolinguistics1
2.1 Languaging and super diversity; continuing the work of the Amager group
Linguistics has been quick to adopt a national basis for the study of distinct languages. In the
present day and age this is not a realistic assumption to build on, hence the alternative basic concept
of languaging (Jørgensen 2010). With the Amager group J. Normann Jørgensen is working to
provide a theoretical and empirical basis for the study of currently ongoing change in Danish
languaging practices. One focus is on the poly-centered set of norms and behaviors which seem to
characterize at least metropolitan adolescents' languaging, not only in Denmark, but also elsewhere
in Europe. The project has followed a cohort of adolescents for three years and has now started
following a cohort of school beginners in order to carry out research among the informants for ten
years paralleling the earlier success of the Køge longitudinal project. This project will yield insight
into changing diffusion patterns which could not have been imagined ten years ago, such as the
spread of norms and practices through social internet media and computer games. The theoretical
1
The papers mentioned in italics throughout are the 10 papers delivered to the evaluation panel. They are listed below.
challenges facing such a task are also being tackled, cf paper 5. The research in the period will
involve new data collection as well as data analysis of trajectories of development for both the
previous cohort and the cohort being followed from 2010 and onwards. Special attention will be
given to integrating results from the same individual in different contexts (in and out of school, in
and out of family) and different modes (speech and the various modes of writing) (Jørgensen,
Madsen, Spindler Møller, Ag and Stæhr with Karrebæk and Wedel Schøning).
2.2 Revisiting central tenets of the Labovian paradigm
The Labovian paradigm from the outset rested on a number of central interlocking tenets. Most of
these have gone through various phases of revision as dissension has been voiced. We have
ourselves contributed to these debates in papers 4 and 8. The consequences of leaving central tenets
of the paradigm will be further explored 2013-15, integrating knowledge from other disciplines
without losing sight of the specificity of language. The first step is to scrutinize the division of the
linguistic sciences between (some version of) formalism and (some version of) functionalism in
order to search deeper for the place of sociolinguistics. The next step is to build alternative theories
based on the empirical findings (Gregersen, Karoli Christensen, Madsen and the team of researchers
as such).
2.3 Variation as a theme in linguistics at large
Variation stands out as a nodal point in the development of linguistic theory. Formalism,
functionalism, and sociolinguistics have all grappled with the problem. In a paper tentatively called
Three approaches to the ‘same’ linguistic problem (cf. the problem addressed in paper 7) we
(Gregersen, Juel Jensen and Christensen) contrast our findings with conclusions reached on the
basis of informants’ own judgments of grammaticality.
The fact that variation abounds in language use poses theoretical problems for traditional
conceptions of both grammar and the language system, mainly with regard to the status of linguistic
categories. Corpus data very rarely support categorical descriptions of form-meaning pairs: most
often, some percentage of the data go against introspectively based hypotheses. The research project
on epistemicity and semantic variation (Christensen) seeks to answer precisely these questions.
Expanding on this theme we plan to place the various kinds of linguistic behavior we have
disclosed, in an integrated production-and-comprehension model that allows for core elements and
outliers so that frequency of use will have theoretical consequences for categorization – here seen as
a continuous and ongoing process (Christensen, Pharao, Gregersen, Juel Jensen).
2.4 Studies in sociolinguistic methodology
Most studies of phonetic patterning use either auditory coding or acoustic measurements. In the
LANCHART project we have used both. A comparative study has been prepared by Gert Foget
Hansen and Nicolai Pharao and will be completed in 2014.
A related theme is that of the possibly historical nature of auditory coding. We shall compare the
codes from 1989 with the LANCHART codes. We may identify exactly which items were coded as
belonging to which variant in a small part of the corpus. This makes it possible to contrast two
kinds of coding done at two different points in time in order to find out if the coders’ own speech
community is a factor (Pharao and Gregersen with Tyler Kendall, University of Oregon, and
Charlotte Vaughn, Northwestern University). This study would amount to a real time trend study of
sociolinguistic perception.
Randi Skovbjerg Sørensen in her Ph D project focuses on the role of the interviewer in producing
‘good’ or ‘bad’ data for sociolinguistics. This study will be integrated with the findings of paper 8
to form a coherent model of where variation comes from in sociolinguistic data to supersede the
Hymes SPEAKING model.
Recent results from the LARM project suggest the prospects of performing a real time panel study
of sociolinguistic perception. Jacob Thøgersen now has acoustic evidence suggesting that members
of different generations would perceive the variants of (a) differently, and that listeners’ perceptions
may change over time. We shall make the original coders recode both old recordings and the
LANCHART re-recordings. This will reveal how perception may change in real time (Pharao,
Thøgersen and Gregersen with Normann Jørgensen and Kjeld Kristensen as well as Kendall and
Vaughn and Foget Hansen).
2.5 Semantic variation
Enlarging the data base will make truly comparative work on lexical variation, constructional
variation (Geeraerts), discourse variation, pragmatic variation, and interactional variation possible
on a much grander scale. The basic issue is that statistical analyses of semantics demand huge
corpora. Tanya Karoli Christensen has developed promising approaches to our set of data
integrating the DCA in studies of the semantic field of epistemicity and this line of research will be
expanded during the next three years (Christensen, Jensen, Gregersen).
LANCHART has already contributed to the heated debates on the distribution of “main clause
phenomena” (most prominently V2) and variation with respect to subclause features such as
complementizers (cf. paper 7 and 319 and 320).We have advanced the hypothesis that V2 serves as
a foregrounding device in spoken Danish. We will pursue this and other hypotheses concerning the
distribution and semantics of word order further: 1) by extending the analyses to cover adverbial
clauses and relative clauses, and 2) by seeking further support for the hypothesis of word order
semantics in correlations of the distribution of V2 with the use of conjunctions, modal particles and
interjections (Jensen and Christensen).
The Dictionary of Spoken Danish (ODT) will be continued, and hopefully expanded through
external grants, for the entire final period (Carsten Hansen, Martin H. Hansen).
2.6 Studies in experimental sociophonetics
We have already established a strong platform in this expansive field (cf. e.g. paper 9). Further
expansion will be guided by a focus on how social meanings are ascribed to variants (Kristiansen,
Maegaard, Pharao, Spindler Møller, Juel Jensen). The picture seems to be different and more
multiplex for older established variants, like the short (a) variants in Danish, than for newer
variants, like e.g. the [s+], with sharply delimited but different social meanings.
The linguistic context matters for how individual variants are perceived. We shall expand the study
of (s) in order to explore how registers are formed. Adapting methods from experimental social
psychology and including grammatical variables will not only shed light on the variables
themselves, but will also provide us with a window to how variation at different linguistic levels go
together in language users’ perceptions.
In order to study how on-going sound change affects representation of speech in the mind, a
collaboration has already started between Nicolai Pharao and Charlotte Vaughn at Northwestern
University, USA, where the roles of social salience and homophony will be explored. Recent
studies including Labov et al. 2011 give methods to study how the frequency of use observed at the
group level affects the perception of individual speakers, who themselves differ in the frequency
with which they use new variants. We will adapt them to confront one obvious ‘paradox’ of the
discipline, which consists in attaching great importance to differences in frequency of occurrence
without knowing whether these frequency limits actually correspond to any psychological reality
(Kristiansen, Maegaard, Pharao, Spindler Møller, Juel Jensen).
2.7 The Gender in Danish and Dutch Youngsters project (GIDDY)
Frans Gregersen and Leonie Cornips have collaborated on analyzing the acquisition and use of
gender in Danish and Dutch by youngsters. This resulted in a joint paper for the 19th
Sociolinguistics Symposium in Berlin 2012 focusing on what both authors call the ‘vulnerability of
gender as a category’. During the collaboration Gregersen and Cornips have worked out an
inventory of available data on Dutch focusing on gender. In a number of cases data for Danish is
missing. This is especially the case for experimental data on the acquisition of gender by Danish
mono- and bilingual children. In the period 2013-15 we shall remedy this lack, making a whole new
series of comparisons possible (Gregersen, Cornips, Boeg Thomsen).
2.8 Studies in Language Attitudes, Ideologies and Patterns of Language Use
The LANCHART study includes data on informants’ linguistic self-evaluation. Analyses of these
self-evaluations, together with the informants’ comments about them in the interviews (coded for
already, in the majority of interviews), will allow for further inquiries into the devious and delicate
relationship between subconsciously offered attitudes, consciously offered attitudes and language
production and comprehension (Kristiansen, Gregersen, Pharao, Scheuer).
People’s opinions on varieties of Danish are important in their own right: They form part of the
growing field of Folk linguistics (Preston). It is obvious that lay people have tremendous problems
understanding us when we pronounce the death of Danish dialects. So what do lay people think of
as dialects? What dialects are they able to distinguish with reasonable certainty and what dialect
borders are most important to them? This will be addressed in a perceptual dialectology project
(Monka, Scheuer, Kristiansen).
The SLICE project will be integrated into the LANCHART centre work. Jacob Thøgersen studies
the role of radio news in the Danish speech community. The corpus makes it possible for us to
answer questions about the media’s possible lagging behind or running ahead of the development in
the speech community at large (Thøgersen, Pharao, Kristiansen).
Finally, we have a large amount of data which lend themselves to discourse analysis of language
variation. Such discourse studies of prevalent ideas about variation may be a valuable supplement to
the more quantitative approach described above (Monka, Scheuer, Kristiansen, Thøgersen).
3. Enlarging the data base of spoken language research
3.1 Transcribing old data, harvesting new
We shall enlarge the data base by transcribing, according to the well tested practices we have
developed, substantial parts of the residual of recordings (cf. paper 1). Transcribing strategically
selected parts of the material along with some new recordings from Bornholm (cf. below) will help
us reach an important limit set to work with written language data of around 15-20 million words
(Gad, Gregersen).
On the other hand, we need to include new types of data. The obvious place to look for them is the
new social media. Andreas Stæhr has pointed the way to go. By making agreements with
informants to harvest large amounts of their internet production we will be able to supplement our
speech production data with written data from the new sphere of intimacy (Stæhr, Thøgersen).
3.2 The LANCHART Centre as a national Centre for knowledge about modern spoken Danish
The LANCHART Centre has as its vision for the coming years to develop into a national centre of
knowledge of spoken Danish. The vision has to be implemented in the context of services to the
educations at the universities in Denmark enabling them to use the data base for all kinds of
searches, all kinds of analyses, cf. on the web applications in sections 3.3.2 and 3.3.3 below.
However, funding from the DNRF will not be used for this purpose (Gregersen, Barner-Rasmussen,
Bøll, Solvang).
3.3 Preparing the LANCHART for embedding
The DNRF has invested in the LANCHART project. Since humanistic studies are labor and wage
intensive most of this investment has now been exchanged for research results. But the
LANCHART is also a corpus and an infra-structure which has to form the basis for research into
spoken Danish in all of the foreseeable future. The embedding agreement securing the support
structure of the centre until at least 2025, is ideal for this purpose since it makes it possible to keep
the centre abreast of developments outside the centre such as infra structures for the humanities in
general.
The ideal outcome, one that is clearly within view, is that the LANCHART corpus is presented as a
series of personalized, secure, human operable interfaces for ‘simple’ searches as well as a number
of documented software services enabling secure and personalized low level access to the
LANCHART data architecture for more advanced needs.
3.3.1 New Data Layer: The data architecture that was originally established has not scaled well
enough and response times for searches remain an issue. A new architecture more suited for fast
text and text pattern matching searches is being planned.
3.3.2 New ‘Business’ and new Front-end layer: The current architecture does not readily enough
lend itself to facilitating large scale access for external processes, e.g. High Performance Computercalculations over the entire annotated orthography. An important vision of the future is that the
corpus hardware and software stack enable a much more explorative approach by the researchers. It
should be easy to create new windows into the data, and new representations of the data for output
in order to facilitate a Rapid Application Development-for-Research path.
3.3.3 New Security Layer and new External Access Layer (Internationalization): A method for
allowing accredited researchers access to the corpus in its various representations and modalities
must be established while honoring the terms of confidentiality. A significant part of this task
consists in establishing a secure layer around the search engine with the ability to serve any number
of sub-corpora to accredited users.
3.4 Research plan for digital humanities
The technological aspect of the LANCHART project constitutes a small research effort in its own
right, orthogonal, but deeply integral, to the linguistic areas of inquiry. Prospects seem particularly
good within the Digital Humanities disciplines of architecting large scale humanistic
data/computing infrastructures, database design and optimization for TextGrid style data.
The need for innovations in this area is great, since neither standard full-text search platforms nor
out-of-the-box data mining solutions are immediately adaptable to LANCHART’s needs due to the
special time-line structure of linguistic annotations and to the fact that traditional linguist
programming platforms like PERL do not scale to LANCHART corpus dimensions. With the
scheduled products LANCHART will be ideally placed to be a major player in developing Danish
humanities research infra-structures to function as integrated hubs in the general European web. As
members of both CLARIN and LARM/Dariah we have a unique experience to build on (BarnerRasmussen).
4. New empirical project: Bornholm
Bornholm is a small island in the Baltic Sea. There are several reasons why Bornholm is of great
interest to sociolinguists.
Firstly, Bornholm has remained uncharted territory for dialectologists and sociolinguists since the
70s when Baumann Larsen and Geist revealed a fundamental structure of Rønne (the main city)
versus the rest. There are even metalinguistic terms for this: People in Rønne are claimed in general
to speak ‘Rønnefint’ (‘Rønne posh’) or to speak ‘thinly’.
Secondly, the orginal Bornholm dialect is conspicuously different from other Danish dialects
(especially in terms of prosody).
Thirdly, the linguistic awareness of Bornholm speakers is presumably higher than at any other
LANCHART site studied. Yet very many Bornholmers tend to lose their prosodic characteristics
when they leave the island. Malene Monka’s forthcoming dissertation on movers and stayers will be
relevant for the understanding of this process.
Fourthly, Bornholm is an extreme case of centre and periphery. In winter, it has its own weather
forecast. In summer, for the very same reason, tourists vastly outnumber residents. Bornholm has
42.000 residents but 300.000 visitors in June July and August taken as a whole.
Finally, Bornholm is the missing link in Danish dialect studies (the Copenhagen department studies
the islands except Bornholm and the Jutland department studies Jutland). Pedersen 2009 has shown
that there are many distinct characteristics in the original dialect, but they are all of them lost now –
we think. The standardization on Bornholm exemplifies a language change which will be an ideal
meeting point for dialectologists, syntacticians, and students of linguistic landscaping and discourse
construction of local identities.
4.1 Data collection
We shall develop a three tiered data collection technique as follows:
(1) First, we collect subconsciously offered attitudes; this is dependent upon no prior knowledge of
our working in the community.
(2) Next we collect data on speech production. We shall conduct sociolinguistic interviews
according to the previously followed LANCHART design for data collection i.e. with informants
distributed across three generations, two sexes and two social classes. We will recruit local
interviewers and interviewers among students who have grown up on Bornholm and contrast such
interviews with insiders with interviews carried out by outsiders. With a smaller part of this group
we shall further collect data from a limited number of different situations, some of them selfrecorded, some of them monitored by a field worker as unobtrusively as possible.
(3) In addition, the smaller group of informants will give judgments in a specially designed
questionnaire honing in on construction types we know will be frequent in their own production as
well, e.g. the embedded clause problems evidenced in paper 7 and the coordination mismatches
studied by Parrott (paper 10). The questionnaire will be partly based on reactions to spoken
language (played by the field worker on site) and partly based on written stimuli in order to control
for differences in normative reactions. Finally, these judgments will after an initial analysis be
tested against a larger group of informants via the internet. It is to be hoped that such experiments
will result in a sort of standard procedure for data collection in the future ensuring a new era of
comparable data.
As part of the N’CLAVE collaboration an initial field trip to Bornholm has been scheduled for
November-December 2012 where we focus on the oldest dialect speakers, thus contributing to our
knowledge of the present day status of this too little studied dialect.
The study of the speech community will be supplemented by a study of linguistic landscaping and
linguistic practices during the summer holidays when visitors will have to be catered for in spoken
and written communication. Such multilingual practices are a necessity for survival for individuals
as well as the community. In this sense we think of Bornholm as a Danish Martha’s Vineyard and it
would be obvious to repeat some of Labov’s early approaches to variation inside the community
and in communication with outsiders in this Danish context.
The extensive tourism during the summer months also leads to a commodification of “Bornholmness”. What tourists are interested in when they visit the island is the “authentic” Bornholm,
visually, linguistically, culturally. In our study we will analyze tourist merchandise (souvenirs),
brochures, websites, signs, and other types of linguistic landscaping, and carry out interviews with
both tourists and hosts about these themes. Methods from linguistic landscaping are already
deployed in the Amager project, and with the Bornholm project they will be extended to this nonurban context.
In a LANCHART perspective, one important focus point is to relate these types of analyses to the
overall theme of language change. How does the process of commodification relate to dialect
change: Commodification, since it tends to be focused on authenticity, will cultivate the original
dialect but will that slow down the process of standardization or just enhance the number of
registers available for performance at selected occasions? (the LANCHART team coordinated by
Marie Maegaard).
5. Internationalization
The LANCHART Centre was a major player in the attempt to create a Niels Bohr professorship for
professor Nikolas Coupland, Cardiff, at the Universities of Copenhagen and Roskilde. The
application for a Niels Bohr professorship was not supported, however. But Professor Nik Coupland
has agreed to take up a half time research professorship at the Department of Scandinavian
Research. This will give us the opportunity to realize some of the initiatives during the final
LANCHART period. We single out among them: The creation of annual symposia and summer
schools will ensure that we do not lose contact with the growth layers of young researchers that we
have hitherto seen at such events.
On the model of the CTR we plan to invite candidates for a Marie Curie post doc grant for a
workshop in Copenhagen. This will be the obvious next step of keeping contact with the best PhDs
from the summer schools.
The LANCHART Centre has hosted a number of guests and will continue to do so, cf. the budget.
Visitors come to Copenhagen in order to discuss general methodological questions. The
methodological focus will be considerably strengthened in the coming period (cf. above). Hence we
hope that the combined efforts of Nik Coupland’s visiting professorship, the SLICE project and a
new focus will serve to place the LANCHART Centre even more firmly at the center of European
and international sociolinguistic research.
6. International publications
The centre staff has increased its output considerably during the first 7 years of its lifetime.
Intensified efforts at publishing earlier in the cycle of empirical research have been modified by our
allegiance to ‘large’ papers reporting on more than one study and reporting ‘final’ results. The
international integration of the LANCHART Centre as well as renewed efforts at using the
collective resources of the staff as a whole has resulted in a production format that makes use of
internal peer reviewers in the guise of international experts as well as colleagues from the
sociolinguistic milieu at and around the centre, before submitting papers to journals or anthologies.
This has proved very helpful.
In the final period of the centre we will optimize the production of first class papers even further.
We intend to develop the internal peer review process and to stipulate that papers should be
presented twice, the first time as an idea and the second time as a near finished paper. In this way
we hope to achieve even more and even better papers - faster.
7. Research training
The most important experience of the first 7 years at the LANCHART Centre is that the centre can
and should play an important role in the recruitment and education of new PhD students. The best
way to do this is to initiate undergraduate students from the second or third years and graduate
students right from the start into research practices by taking them on as student assistants. The
student assistants should gradually be promoted from transcribers through proof reading jobs to
coders and field workers. This model has proved very successful and the track record of this centre
is unique in this respect within the Humanities, for precisely that reason. This is one of many good
reasons why the budget for the new period includes a heavy budget post for student assistance, cf.
also the Bornholm project above. The centre continues to be an environment where former
employees come to write their MA theses and receive supervision.
8. Organization
Since coding and transcription stopped in November 2011, the senior researchers have by and large
had no leadership duties; the organization has focused on producing papers. This means that the
former intense meeting activities where each group leader reported regularly about the progress to
date thus coordinating the empirical effort, have been substituted by less formal meeting types
aimed at finalizing and improving papers for journals. We will adapt the organization to suit the
new period’s priorities. This means re-introducing joint meetings but only on focused themes and
problems that help bringing the group as such to a new level of understanding. Also it has proved
necessary to develop some consistency in the use of terms and methods. The focus on theory and
methodology lends itself particularly well to a more flexible meeting plan. The new period will start
already in January 2013 with a three day external future workshop focusing on priorities in the
upcoming period.
Starting 2013 more attention will be given to exploiting the competencies of the senior researchers
to attract students for summer schools as well as visitors to the centre, and to obtain grants for PhD
scholarships from external funds. In this way, senior researchers will get ready to start their own
projects so that the LANCHART will breed a new generation of centres. The support structure for
such grant applications is already in place.
1. Frans Gregersen, Marie Maegaard and Nicolai Pharao: Contribution to Jacques Durand,
Ulrike Guth and Gjert Kristoffersen (eds.) Handbook of Corpus Phonology on: The
LANCHART Corpus, Oxford University Press, forthcoming (accepted)
2. Tore Kristiansen and Nikolas Coupland (eds.): Standard Languages and Language
Standards in a changing Europe, Oslo: Novus 2011. This book will be sent separately. It
may be kept.
3. Marie Maegaard, Torben Juel Jensen, Tore Kristiansen and Jens Normann Jørgensen:
Diffusion of Language Change: Accommodation to a Moving Target, submitted for peer
review Journal of Sociolinguistics, March 2012
4. Frans Gregersen and Michael Barner-Rasmussen: The Logic of Comparability: On genres
and phonetic variation in a project on language change in real time. Corpus Linguistics and
Linguistic Theory, 7/1, special issue: Sociolingustics and Corpus Linguistics, edited by
Tyler Kendall and Gerard van Herk, p.7-36, 2011
5. J. Normann Jørgensen, Martha Karrebæk, Lian Malai Madsen and Janus Spindler Møller:
Polylanguaging in Superdiversity, Diversities 13/2, special issue Language and
Superdiversities, guest edited by Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton and Massimiliano Spotti,
p.23-38, 2011
6. Gert Foget Hansen and Nicolai Pharao: Differences in formant values caused by different
microphone set ups, submitted for peer review, JASA, May 2012.
7. Torben Juel Jensen and Tanya Karoli Christensen: Promoting the demoted. Submitted for
peer review, Lingua, May 2012.
8. Frans Gregersen, J. Normann Jørgensen and Janus Spindler Møller: Sideways, five
methodological studies of sociolinguistic interviews, submitted for peer review, Language
Variation and Change, April 2012
9. Nicolai Pharao, Marie Maegaard, Janus Spindler Møller and Tore Kristiansen: Indexical
meanings of [s+] among Copenhagen youth: Social perception of a phonetic variant in
different linguistic contexts. Submitted for peer review, Language in Society