Maegaard2013 Dinamarca

Journal of Sociolinguistics 17/1, 2013: 3–36
Diffusion of language change:

Accommodation to a moving target
Marie Maegaard, Torben Juel Jensen, Tore Kristiansen

and Jens Normann Jørgensen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
The paper focuses on motivations for the spread of new features within a
speech community, and on the trajectories the changes follow during
diffusion. One set of data represents language use, and here focus is on two
changes which have been going on in Danish over the past 40 years, one
grammatical and one phonetic. The other set of data are results from a
nationwide speaker evaluation experiment which tests the subconscious
attitudes to different types of speech among the youth in five different places
covering Denmark from east to west. Results show that changes spread
centrifugally from Copenhagen, even to the extent that reversal of changes
spreads from Copenhagen. Furthermore, the attitudes reflected in the
speaker evaluation experiment support the theory that language change is
motivated by social psychological factors. Finally, it is argued that it is
worthwhile considering the possibility of media being involved in processes
of linguistic change.
Artiklen fokuserer på årsager til spredning af nye træk i et sprogsamfund,
og på hvordan spredningen foregår. Et datasæt repræsenterer sprogbrug,
og her fokuseres på to forandringer som har fundet sted i dansk gennem de
sidste 40 år, en grammatisk og en fonetisk. Det andet datasæt stammer fra
en landsdækkende undersøgelse af underbevidste holdninger til forskellige
typer af talesprog blandt unge på fem forskellige steder placeret i en linje
der dækker Danmark fra øst til vest. Resultaterne viser at ændringerne i
brug spredes centrifugalt fra København, i en grad så resten af landet
følger trop også når København reverserer en igangværende ændring.
De vurderinger der kommer til udtryk i holdningsundersøgelserne,
understøtter teorien om at sprogforandring er motiveret af socialpsykologiske
faktorer. Til slut argumenteres der for at det er værd at overveje mediernes
mulige rolle i sprogforandringsprocesser. [Danish]
KEYWORDS: Language change, real time, grammatical variation,

phonetic variation, language attitudes, standardization
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA
4 MAEGAARD ET AL.
INTRODUCTION
Language change basically presents to sociolinguistics two problems which
concern both innovation and diffusion. One problem concerns the why; the other
problem concerns the how of innovation and spread. In this article we focus on
the how and why of diffusion, i.e. we ask what motivates the spread of new
features within a speech community, and we ask what trajectories the changes
follow during diffusion.
Diffusion – how
Models of linguistic diffusion commonly track how an observed linguistic
innovation spreads from a relatively narrow area or relatively narrow social
group to wider areas and groups. Several influential models build on water
metaphors to highlight an assumed basic difference in how linguistic
innovations spread. Among these models is the wave model (e.g. Bailey
1973) which sees diffusion happening in more or less concentric waves from a
centre to increasingly peripheral environments. Bailey (1973: 77), further-
more, describes change as happening in s-shaped curves, as the innovation
spreads slowly to new environments in the beginning, but gradually speeds up,
until almost complete, at which time it again slowly casts away the remaining
pockets of the old phenomenon (see, for instance, Kristensen and Thelander
(1984) who compare the spread of change in a Danish and a Swedish dialect
area as described by the wave model). According to Britain (2010a: 148), the
wave model sees ‘innovations, like the ripple effect caused when a pebble is
dropped into a puddle, radiate over time out from a central focal area, reaching
physically nearby locations before those at ever greater distances’, whereas
another model related to a water metaphor is the so-called cascade diffusion
model. Chambers and Trudgill mention the development described in this
model as ‘the jumping of the innovation from one large town to another, and
from these to smaller towns, and so on’ (1980: 192). Britain describes it as ‘the
hierarchical effect’ (2002: 623), since in cascade diffusion ‘innovations
descend down a hierarchy of large city, to city, to large town, to town, village
and country’ (Britain 2010a: 148). An early example is Trudgill (1974) who
traces the spread of an innovative pronunciation from larger town to smaller
town and from there to rural areas in Brunlanes, Norway. Trudgill theorizes
that the strength of a spreading influence can be quantified by measure of the
physical distance between the source and the eventual recipient of an
innovation, and by measure of their relative population sizes.
A third model associated with a water metaphor is the upstream model (Britain
2010a: 148; contra-hierarchical diffusion) which views innovations as spreading
from, for instance, rural areas to urban areas. Bailey et al. (1993) illustrate this
with the spreading of a quasi-modal, fixin to, from rural to urban areas in
Oklahoma, a change that runs counter to other developments in the area.

ACCOMMODATION TO A MOVING TARGET 5
All of these studies focus on the trajectory of linguistic change – where is the
source of an innovation, and to where is it spread? The metaphors picture
patterns of use which differ in terms of how the relative frequency of variants is
distributed across geographical space, and, by extension social space in a wider
sense. Whether the patterns are actually of one or the other type is an
empirical question (an overview of types of diffusion models with many
references can be found in Britain 2010a). In this paper we trace the path of
two major innovations in Danish – we study how the changes in question lead
to quantitatively different patterns at different times and with different
generations in different places. The innovative variants (see below) apparently
first spread and then recede. This enables us to track possible upstream
tendencies as well as the path of diffusion.
Diffusion – why
Aitchison (2001: 133) dryly observes that ‘In the past, language change has
been attributed to a bewildering variety of factors ranging over almost every
aspect of human life, physical, social, mental and environmental’. In and of
themselves the water-metaphor models we looked at, above, do not tell us
anything about the forces driving diffusion. Other labels for diffusion – like
contagion diffusion and urban hierarchical diffusion – more readily read as
implying assumptions about the driving force behind change. The notion of
contagion associates more readily with something that comes by itself, almost
mechanically, while the notion of a hierarchy from large city to country may be
more likely to evoke a perspective from social psychology involving the notion
of prestige. However, scholarly treatments of linguistic change usually
introduce interaction as the sine condition qua non of diffusion. The driving
force issue is basically the same, and has to do with the nature of linguistic
influence in interaction: is diffusion the result of ‘mechanical’ or ‘ideological’
influence?
The concept of mechanical or automatic influence derives from a theoretical
prioritizing of the quantitative asymmetries in interaction: dialect levelling takes
place in routinely occurring contexts, where linguistic differences are reduced as
the more frequent variants win out. This way of conceptualizing the driving
force behind diffusion is common. Even Labov, who began his agenda-setting
work by singling out ‘the evaluation problem’ as the most central task to be
solved by the theory of language change (Labov 1972), has been advocating the
mechanical view of diffusion in his more recent writings. Labov now emphasizes
Bloomfield’s principle of density, that ‘people automatically and inevitably
influence each other’s language each time they speak to each other’ (Labov
2002: n.p.), and consequently downplays the role of social psychological factors:
The principle of density implicitly asserts that we do not have to search for a
motivating force behind the diffusion of linguistic change. The effect is a

6 MAEGAARD ET AL.
mechanical and inevitable one; the implicit assumption is that social evaluation
and attitudes play a minor role. (Labov 2001: 20)
Labov takes the mechanical position as a consequence of persistent failure to
establish firm empirical evidence for influence on use from covert social values
(Labov 2001: 216ff.; see discussion in Kristiansen 2010).
To others, the mechanical view appears to be just self-evident. In Denmark
the ‘mechanical’ conceptualization of the levelling process was heralded by
Brink and Lund as the Napoleon principle:
the language of a capital city can succeed in spreading its forms to the rest of the
country purely by contagion, namely according to what we term the Napoleon-
principle: the enemy is slain where he is weakest and immediately enrolled in the
victor’s troops. (Brink and Lund 1979: 202; emphasis in original)
Brink and Lund are the authors of a classical work on the Danish standard
language (Brink and Lund 1975). The authors assume that prestige may
influence the battle and speed up the advance of the new variant, but at the
same time strongly denounce the view that prestige can achieve something
that ‘ordinary linguistic influence’ could not have achieved on its own (Brink
and Lund 1979: 203).
The empirical search for independent evidence of a motivating, social
psychological, force behind linguistic diffusion has often been low on the
agenda of variationist sociolinguistics. In that light, we find it timely to quote
how Trudgill finished the 1974 article mentioned above:
There are many factors other than those we have discussed which an adequate
model will need to incorporate. A measure of attitudinal factors, for instance, will
clearly be required. If we are fully to understand the diffusion of linguistic
changes we shall require to know the extent to which a feature has prestige or
[…] covert prestige. (Trudgill 1974: 241)
It does not become less timely by the fact that Trudgill, in line with Labov, has
also changed his view on this subject in recent writings. Investigations of social
psychological factors are no longer seen as a prerequisite for a full understand-
ing of changes in language use. For instance, in a discussion of new-dialect
formation, Trudgill suggests that it is ‘[an] innate tendency to behavioral
coordination, not identity, that is the very powerful drive that makes dialect
mixture an almost inevitable consequence of dialect contact, to an extent that
factors connected with identity would not and could not’ (Trudgill 2008: 252).
In his theorizing about geographical diffusion in a series of influential texts
from more recent years, Britain (2002, 2010a, 2010b) follows up on the
requirement of including the attitudinal aspect in an explanatory model of
linguistic diffusion. His concept of spatiality is explained as:
a tridimensional realization of space. […] It is at once physical (how far is it from
Earth to the Moon?), social (the human mediation and manipulation of space, in

terms of both the mundane life paths of individuals in their communities

interacting with the life paths of others and the institutional structuring of that
space) and psychological (our reactions to and interpretations of perceptions of
physical and social spaces). (Britain 2010b: 72)
Apparently Britain does not require an independent measure of attitudinal
factors and their effect. Following a rather common practice in variationist
sociolinguistics, he seems to find it acceptable to infer social evaluation, and
possible changes in social evaluation, from patterns of use alone.
In sum, we find it premature to join Labov and Trudgill in drawing radical
theoretical conclusions about the nature of diffusion as a primarily mechanical
process with only a marginal role to be played by social evaluation. As we
observe Britain’s incorporation of the psychological (perceptual and
attitudinal) dimension as an essential aspect of diffusion theory, we find
Trudgill’s original requirement important, that attitudes should be measured.
Studies of language attitudes require collection and analyses of independent
data (i.e. in addition to use data). In this paper we report on parallel studies of
language attitudes and patterns of variable use carried out in the same four
sites in Denmark.
THE DANISH CONTEXT

Copenhagen Danish
Having mentioned that London and indeed the entire southeast of England
seem to have been an influential centre of linguistic innovation for centuries,
Britain (2002: 616f.) goes on to say:
In the latter decades of the twentieth century, however, interest in the apparent
levelling of traditional dialects in Britain has grown, particularly in the media,
who have created a beast known as ‘Estuary English’ (‘Estuary’ here relating to
the Estuary of the Thames, the principal river flowing through London and
southern England) which is, apparently, eating up dialects as it marches across
the dialect landscape of southern England and beyond.
This beast, whether it has a U.K. reality or not, has a two-headed Danish
cousin: Copenhagen speech. Its one head is regularly called rigsdansk, the other
one københavnsk. These names refer to two Copenhagen ‘varieties’ which are
constructed as relatively stable combinations of variants from the phonetic
variation which characterizes Copenhagen speech. In terms of stereotypes,
rigsdansk is associated with high socio-economic status, københavnsk with low
socio-economic status. In the sociolinguistic literature, the two varieties have
traditionally been referred to as High Copenhagen and Low Copenhagen. Today
we prefer to use the terms Conservative and Modern, as socio-economic status
associations seem to be less pertinent than they used to be, and the direction of
change has been found to go from Low to High (Brink and Lund 1974). We also

8 MAEGAARD ET AL.
use these terms in what follows, unless we refer to earlier studies which have
used the High–Low distinction.
In Brink and Lund (1975) we get a glimpse of the change in Copenhagen. The
sociolects developed in different directions during the 1800s to reach a
maximum of difference by the year 1900. After 1900 most changes in
Copenhagen speech have been Low sociolect features moving into the High
sociolect. According to Brink and Lund the Copenhagen High sociolect is
identical with the Rigsmål, i.e. national standard speech, and, with the
exception of intonation, the Copenhagen Low sociolect can also be characterized
as a Low national standard. Brink and Lund (1974) argue that all changes
which spread to the whole country do so with Copenhagen as the centre. The
major road of changes therefore goes from Low Copenhagen to High
Copenhagen, and from Copenhagen to the rest of the country, supported by
both Low and High. Examples are the raised short a before alveolars and the
lowering of [ä] after [r].
The Copenhagen influence on the speech in the rest of Denmark is usually
described as very strong. Already by around 1980, the traditional Danish
dialects were all but eradicated in the youngest generation – in the sense that
adolescents everywhere by then had begun interacting – not only in school,
but also in their peer groups – in language which was much closer to
Copenhagen speech than to the traditional local dialects (Pedersen 2003).
The first variationist study in Denmark, by Kristensen 1973–1977
(Kristensen 1977) was early enough to catch a glimpse of how the change
from traditional dialect to Copenhagen speech happened. In Vinderup, a small
town in Western Jutland almost as far away from Copenhagen as one can get
(see Figure 1), Kristensen examined 13 ‘traditional dialect vs. rigsmål’
variables (rigsmål is the academic term for standard spoken Danish, generally
called rigsdansk) and found that the older part of the population spoke
predominantly traditional dialect (individual levels at 80% plus) while the
younger generations spoke predominantly rigsmål (individual levels at 80%
plus), with only a few individuals who used the two to more or less the same
extent.
A number of studies have taken the Brink and Lund description of the
diffusion of change in Denmark as their take-off point and studied the spread of
Copenhagen features to different localities in the country. Nielsen and Nyberg
(1992) studied the frequency of certain features among different generations in
Odder, a provincial town in Jutland (see Figure 1). They found that the
community has undergone substantial change already, and that indeed the
Copenhagen features become increasingly frequent with younger generations.
Jørgensen and Kristensen (1994) traced some of the same Copenhagen
features among young speakers in Næstved, ca. 100 km south of Copenhagen
in Southern Zealand (see Figure 1). They found that the Copenhagen variants
were relatively frequent in Næstved compared to Odder and other places in
Jutland such as Vinderup (Kristensen 1977) and Hirtshals (see below).
Figure 1: The LANCHART communities placed on a map of Denmark (Copenhagen,

Næstved, Vissenbjerg, Odder, and Vinderup) with nearby larger cities (Odense,
Århus, and Holstebro)
Jørgensen and Kristensen (1995) have modeled the spread of Copenhagen

features into Vinderup speech and Næstved speech, respectively. They base
their model on Bailey’s (1973) wave model of linguistic change and find that
the changes spread in the given places quite precisely as predicted by the wave
model (Jørgensen and Kristensen 1995: 160).
The Hirtshals project (Hansen and Lund 1983) studied the role of the
traditional dialect vs. standardized forms of speech, particularly among grade
school students in a community situated at the far North West of Jutland. Lund
(1983) found that the traditional dialect was still understood by the students.
It was also used more frequently by grade school students than reports from
elsewhere in Denmark indicated, although it was also on the retreat here. In
another part of the same project Jørgensen (1983) similarly found that a
language shift had taken place in the community, with the oldest generation
using a fair amount of traditional dialect features, while the youngest
generation had shifted into using standard features with a small, although
characteristic set of local features.
There is, thus, a range of evidence which indicates that the major change at
the national level is one of standardization of speech, based on Copenhagen
variants. The Copenhagen variants mainly have their origin in the Low
10 MAEGAARD ET AL.
sociolect. However, Pedersen (2003: 26) points out that there are changes at
regional levels which do not have Copenhagen speech as their centre, and she
views these as changes that lead to ‘subtle regional features’ which diverge
from the Copenhagen standard features. However, these features do not spread
beyond the regional level to communities in the rest of the country.
The variationist studies from the late 1980s (Nielsen and Nyberg 1993;
Jørgensen and Kristensen 1994) not only confirm that spread seems to
emanate from Copenhagen, they also substantiate that dialect features are
largely gone at all other linguistic levels than the prosodic. In fact, by the
1980s variationist studies of dialect vs. rigsmål variables made little sense, so
the focus was moved to age-related variation within the rigsmål. Modern
variants were found to diffuse more easily into the speech of the young than
into the speech of the older informants in Odder (Nielsen and Nyberg 1993),
and were found to dominate among young speakers in Næstved (Jørgensen
and Kristensen 1994). The steady way in which the use of Modern variants
was found to increase – across geography and age – might be seen as an
indication of a spread which develops mechanically. However, independently
established attitudinal patterns, which we present below, indicate that the
increasing predominance of Modern over Conservative is also ideologically
driven.
So far, three LANCHART1 (see below) studies focus on the spread of
Copenhagen features by comparing recorded speech from the same individual
speakers over a twenty-year gap, from 1978–1989 to 2005–2010. Schøning
and Pedersen (2009) find that in Vinderup the local dialect has lost ground to
the Copenhagen features over two generations to the extent that almost
nothing is left of the very locally-based features. In comparing the two sites of
Vinderup and Odder they conclude that Odder has been through gradual
change whereas Vinderup has experienced a genuine shift from the traditional
dialect to the standard over the course of one generation.
Jensen and Maegaard (2010, 2012) have compared the same two Jutland
sites with respect to two different past participle suffixes. They find that the
Copenhagen variant has advanced further at the cost of the local variant, and
in an earlier generation, in Odder than in Vinderup, the more rural of the two,
thereby supporting the idea of a difference between the two sites with respect to
the diffusion of the Copenhagen speech. Kammacher, Stæhr and Jørgensen
(2011), who have studied Næstved, reach the conclusion that the variants
associated with young Copenhagen speech (i.e. what to an older generation in
Copenhagen would be associated with the Low sociolect) have advanced
further among the speakers born around 1970 than they had among the same
individuals in the 1980s. Kammacher and colleagues set out to test the
hypothesis derived from Kristiansen’s work in Næstved that the motivation for
language change is to be found in social psychological factors – more
specifically, in positive attitudes towards a certain way of speaking (Kristiansen
and Jørgensen 2005). They found support for the hypothesis in the fact that
those groups who were more positive in the 1980s to the variants studied were
also those who had gone farthest to pick them up.
In sum, there is some evidence that language change in Denmark which
reaches nationwide, spreads from Copenhagen. Most studies find an
unequivocal influence from Copenhagen in all places, although the rate of
change is not the same. The LANCHART studies confirm this picture. In the
following, we take a closer look at the relationship between the patterns of
change and the patterns of social evaluations accompanying the changes
which we can observe in the LANCHART material.
The LANCHART project and corpus

The analyses that we present in this paper are based on the LANCHART corpus
(Gregersen 2009; Gregersen and Barner-Rasmussen 2011). The LANCHART
project is a real-time study of spoken language in Denmark. In Denmark, as in
most European countries, the sociolinguistic studies of variation started out as
studies of dialect levelling. The earliest quantitative studies of linguistic
variation were based on recordings carried out in the 1970s. More followed in
the 1980s. The LANCHART corpus consists of the early recordings from six of
these studies (Kristensen 1977; Gregersen and Pedersen 1991; Kristiansen
1991; Nielsen and Nyberg 1992, 1993; Jørgensen and Kristensen 1994;
Pedersen 1994), as well as new recordings (carried out in 2005–2010) with
the same informants who participated in the original studies, and recordings
with new (young) informants in the same communities.
The early studies were carried out as separate studies, by different
researchers, and with different goals and research interests. Consequently,
data from these studies differ regarding both informant types (especially with
respect to age) and conversation types (especially with respect to length, and
the diversity of conversation types). On the other hand, all studies systemat-
ically include younger and older informants of different gender and social class,
recorded in sociolinguistic interviews. In this paper we use interview data from
four out of the five different sites: Copenhagen, Næstved, Odder and Vinderup
(the Vissenbjerg data are of a different type and are not considered here). The
sites differ both with respect to size (see Table 1) and location (see Figure 1).
From each site a sample of informants, representing gender, social class,
and age groups, has been selected. The plots in Figure 2 show, for each site,
the number of informants and their distribution on year of birth. The
LANCHART corpus is structured by generation in three age groups:
generation 1 (born 1942–1963); generation 2 (born 1964–1973); and
generation 3 (born 1987–1996). In each of these subgroups at each site, the
informants are distributed evenly with regard to gender and social class (see
Gregersen 2009 for a detailed description of the LANCHART corpus). Due to
the different age profiles of the different studies we treat age, expressed by
year of birth, as a continuous variable in this study.

12 MAEGAARD ET AL.
Table 1: Number of inhabitants in the four interview sites

(figures are the number of inhabitants in the larger urban area)
Locality Number of inhabitants
Greater Copenhagen 2,000,000

Næstved 50,000
Odder 12,000
Vinderup 3,000
One additional data set, which is not part of the LANCHART corpus, has
been found to be relevant to the analyses in this paper. Mette Mortensen
collected data for a study of Copenhagen speech in 1970–1971. For several
reasons these data – stemming from short, rather formal, interviews with 25
informants born in 1915 and 22 born in 1945 – are not directly comparable
Copenhagen Naestved
10 15 20 25 30 35
10 15 20 25 30 35
Frequency
Frequency
5
5
0
1940 1960 1980 2000 1940 1960 1980 2000

Total number of participants: 66 Total number of participants: 56
Odder Vinderup
10 15 20 25 30 35
10 15 20 25 30 35
Frequency
Frequency
5
5
0
1940 1960 1980 2000 1940 1960 1980 2000

Total number of participants: 57 Total number of participants: 49
Figure 2: Age profiles of the four original studies. The charts show the number of
informants with a certain year of birth (five-year-intervals)

with the LANCHART data, but they are nevertheless valuable for what they
can add in terms of time depth to our analyses (see Jørgensen 1980 for the only
published report on these data).
LINGUISTIC VARIABLES
Generic pronouns
In modern Danish, a handful of pronouns may be used with generic reference.
We define a pronoun with generic reference as a pronoun referring to a group
of people not further defined (in some cases possibly anybody), i.e. not just the
speaker, the addressee, or some specific third party. In English, the second
person pronoun you or the indefinite pronoun one can be used with generic
reference. In traditional dialects of Danish, the possible variants include first
person plural vi, third person singular (common gender) den, and third person
plural de. In the LANCHART corpus, however, only the three following
variants occur more than sporadically:
• man, third person singular, derived from the noun man(d) English man
• du, second person singular pronoun
• en, third person pronoun, derived from the numeral en English one
Examples 1–3 are authentic occurrences of these pronouns from the
LANCHART corpus.
Example 1
man behøver bare at tage bussen for at høre at de unge taler utrolig dårligt
‘one only needs to go on the bus to hear that the young people talk incredibly
bad’
Example 2
og dengang skulle man ikke nødvendigvis have studentereksamen for at komme ind på
seminariet du kunne faktisk komme ind med med # der fra tredje real real
‘and at that time one didn’t need a high school certificate in order to enter
a teacher’s college you could actually be admitted from upper secondary
school’
Example 3
de bad faktisk en om at vaske fingre hele tiden
‘in fact they asked one to wash one’s finger all the time’
The general impression, in Denmark as in other European countries (and
francophone Canada), is that the generic use of the second person pronoun is
new, or that it has at least increased significantly during the past few

14 MAEGAARD ET AL.
decades, possibly as a result of influence from English. The generic use of du

has been the object of public debate, especially in the 1980s. It has generally
been accused, even by some linguists, of being ‘illogical’ (when used where
the reference clearly does not include the addressee) and for causing
misunderstandings, if the addressee does not realize that the pronoun is
intended for generic instead of second person reference (Jensen 2008) – but
generic du was never socially stigmatized in the same way as a-fronting (to
be treated below).
The use of the second person pronouns for generic reference has been
described by a number of linguists (e.g. Bolinger 1979; Kitagawa and Lehrer
1990; Blondeau 2001; Berman 2004; Hyman 2004). Quantitative work on
variation and change in the use of second person pronouns versus other
pronouns for generic reference includes studies of French, the first being
Laberge’s study of indefinite pronouns in Montreal French (Laberge 1976;
Laberge and Sankoff 1980) and, more recently, of Danish (Jensen 2009;
Nielsen, Fogtmann and Jensen 2009). These studies find that the use of
personal pronouns is indeed an area of grammar which exhibits much
variation – probably, as Coveney (2003) points out, because of the close
association of these pronouns with social relationships.
It was, therefore, an obvious choice to include the use of pronouns with
generic reference in the LANCHART study of language changes in Danish of
the 1900s. The design allows us to study the spread of the generic use of the
second person singular pronoun du in relation to geography as well as gender,
social class, and age. The design of the study of generic pronouns, furthermore,
includes three internal linguistic factors (see below) in order to assess possible
functional differences between du and the other pronouns.
Pronunciation of the short a

In the sociolinguistic literature on Danish, the most thoroughly studied
variants are those which have occurred in the realization of short a throughout
the 1900s (Brink and Lund 1975; Jørgensen 1980; Gregersen and Lise
Pedersen, 1991; Gregersen, Maegaard and Pharao 2009). A development
involving fronting and raising began in the early 1900s in which original [ɑ]
and the innovation [æ] achieved a high degree of complementary distribution:
in standard Danish [æ] is expected before alveolars and syllable boundaries,
and [ɑ] is expected before labials and dorsals. Each of these can be interpreted
as sociophonetic variables, (æ) and (ɑ). The phonetic analyses we present in
this paper focus on variation in the variable (æ), i.e. short a before alveolars
and syllable boundaries.
Over the past 40 years, several studies have argued that a change is in
progress, concerning the raising of [æ] to [e] (Brink and Lund 1975; Jørgensen
1980; Gregersen and Lise Pedersen 1991). At the same time, use of the [e]
variant was commonly associated with working-class speech and was severely

stigmatized in the middle class. It is called ‘flat a’ in public discourse and is still
often criticized, as in Example 4 below. The example is a comment from a non-
professional, and is taken from an internet debate about the linguistic
behaviour of a journalist chairing a political TV-debate (www.altinget.dk
2011):
Example 4
For os i provinsen, der er interesserede i dansk sprogrøgt, er hendes accent et
charmerende pust mellem al Jeres grimme københavner-dansk med flade a’er og andre
forvrængninger af det danske sprog.
‘To us, living in the countryside, and interested in Danish language care, her
accent is a charming breath of fresh air between all your ugly Copenhagener-
Danish with flat a’s and other distortions of the Danish language.’
The attention paid to this variation over the past decades, by scholars and non-
professionals alike, and the arguments that this variable is undergoing change,
makes it an interesting variable for a study of change in real time.
CHANGE IN TIME AND SPACE

Generic pronouns
First, all occurrences of pronouns with possible generic reference (i.e. all
forms of the lexemes en, du and man) in the corpus were tagged
automatically. Afterwards these tokens were reviewed manually to exclude
non-generic uses as well as tokens occurring in non-completed constructions
(i.e. clauses interrupted before an interpretable intentional meaning has been
expressed). The resulting 31,908 tokens were coded with respect to a
number of syntactic and semantic factors that might influence the choice
between du and other generic pronouns (Jensen 2009). As the focus of this
article is on the geographical diffusion patterns, we only briefly mention the
three linguistic factors which turned out to be important and which we
added to the statistical model presented below (see Jensen 2009 for a more
thorough discussion of the linguistic factors). The first linguistic factor
(Subject) is the clause subject, i.e. we determine whether or not the pronoun
functions as the grammatical subject of the clause. The second factor (Ref2)
is the addressee, i.e. we determine whether or not the addressee is included in
the reference of the pronoun, as established by a pragmatic analysis of the
context. The third factor (Conditional) is the form of the construction, i.e. we
determine whether the pronoun occurs in a conditional construction. In
addition to the linguistic factors, we have incorporated a number of non-
linguistic factors in the analysis. They include the year of birth, gender, and
social class of the speaker, as well as the place and time of the recording
(ToRec).

16 MAEGAARD ET AL.
The overall proportion of du in the data is 16 percent. The rest of the

pronouns with generic reference are occurrences of man and en. The latter two
come close to a complementary distribution: man is used exclusively in
contexts where the pronoun functions as the grammatical subject; and
en almost only where it does not function as subject (Jensen 2009).
The raw results with respect to the effects of the different factors can be seen
in Appendix 1, but in order to take into account possible interactions between
the factors, and the fact that the individual speakers do not contribute equally
with tokens of generic pronouns, we assess the factors described above via
generalized linear mixed effects models using R’s glmer-function,2 including
the speaker (Participant) as a random effect. This type of statistical model takes
into account the non-repeatable effect of the individual speaker by assigning a
baseline mean (intercept) to each individual with respect to the dependent
variable, as an adjustment for the fact that the behaviour of individuals cannot
be expected to be completely determined by the social and linguistic factors.
A mixed effects model is more conservative in that the social and linguistic
factors (the fixed effects) are only chosen as significant when they are strong
enough to rise above the inter-speaker variation (Baayen 2008; Johnson
2009).
Through the analysis and comparison of possible models and the use of
model criticism (Baayen 2008) we reached the model which most accurately
describes the variation in the data given the factors we include in the study (cf.
Appendix 2). Figures 3 and 4 show the model effects, i.e. the probability of du
estimated by the model as a function of a (statistically significant) factor when
all the other factors are kept constant. Where the model includes an
interaction between two factors, they are shown together.3
As documented in Figure 3 the model shows that du is favoured in contexts
where the pronoun does not function as the grammatical subject, and where
the addressee is included in the reference. These effects interact with the factor
Locality – they are much more pronounced in the eastern localities than in the
western. The effect of the factor Conditional, on the other hand, does not
interact with Locality but with the time of recording (ToRec): whether or not
the pronoun occurs in a conditional construction is less important for the
prediction of du-occurrence in the new recordings.
The model also shows that du is more favoured by male speakers than
females, and more by working-class speakers than middle-class speakers, but
these effects are also influenced by the time of recording, being much more
pronounced in the new recordings than in the old ones. There is no significant
difference between the use by men and women, or between the use by
working-class and middle-class speakers, in the 1980s. What has happened is
that the middle-class speakers and the women have reduced their use of du in
period from the 1980s to the 2000s while the working-class speakers and the
men have increased their use a little.

0.5
0.30
Probability of 'du'
Probability of 'du'
0.4
1980s
0.20
2000s
0.3
0.10
0.2
ToRec
0.1
0.00
–20 –10 0 10 20 30 Female Male
Birth year (Centered, 0=1967) Gender
0.30
0.30
Probability of 'du'
1980s 1980s
Probability of 'du'
0.20
0.20
2000s 2000s
0.10
0.10
ToRec
ToRec
0.00
0.00
MC WC No Yes
Social class Conditional
0.30
0.30
Copenhagen
Probability of 'du'
Probability of 'du'
Copenhagen
0.20
0.20
Naestved
Naestved
0.10
0.10
Locality
Locality
Odder
Odder
Vinderup Vinderup
0.00
0.00
No Yes No Yes
Subject Addressee included in reference
Figure 3: Mixed model effects, generic du

0.25
Probability of 'du'
0.15
2000s
0.05
ToRec
1980s
Copenhagen Naestved Odder Vinderup
Locality
Figure 4: Mixed model effect of locality and time of recording, generic du

18 MAEGAARD ET AL.
These interactions with time of recording all point in the direction of an

ongoing change, and this is also the case for the effect of the factor Birth year.
Before adding this factor to the model, we centred the year of birth by
subtracting the column mean of 1966.761 from the value (e.g. a Birth year
value of 9.239 corresponds to a year of birth of 1976). The effect of increasing
the year of birth is negative: the model documents that the younger informants
use less du than the older informants. This strongly suggests an ongoing
change in which the use of du is decreasing, and we would therefore also
expect a negative effect of the time of recording, with less du in the 2000s
recordings than in the 1980s recordings.
Yet, as shown in Figure 4, the factor ToRec interacts heavily with the factor
Locality, and it is actually only in Copenhagen that there is a significant
decline in the use of du between the old and the new recordings. In Næstved
the use of du is stable, while it actually increases in Odder and, even more, in
Vinderup. In the recordings from the 1980s we see a clear pattern with respect
to the use of du: the Copenhageners are in the lead followed by the Næstved
informants while the informants from the westernmost location, Vinderup, use
du the least. In the recordings from the 2000s this geographical pattern has
almost gone, and the use of du is about the same in all four localities (the only
statistically significant difference remaining is between Copenhagen and
Odder).
Our interpretation of the results is that the increased use of du started in
Copenhagen, hence the highest use of it there at the time of the old recordings in
the 1980s, and has spread from there to the rest of the country in a pace
dependent on distance to Copenhagen. However, the use of du had peaked in
Copenhagen already at the time of the old recordings, or shortly thereafter, and in
the period from the 1980s to the 2000s it declines in Copenhagen, and later also
in Næstved. In the Jutland localities, Odder and Vinderup, the use of du is on the
rise for a larger part of the period, and these informants therefore catch up with
the Copenhageners in the new recordings. At some point in time before the new
recordings, the decrease in the use of du has spread also to the Jutland localities, as
the negative effect of Birth year does not interact with Locality. In other words,
the younger informants use less du than the older informants regardless of where
they live, indicating that the use of du is now in decline everywhere.
As described above, the results show that the use of du has been in decline in
Copenhagen more or less for the whole period since the late 1980s, and that
this decline has spread, during the 2000s, to the rest of the country in a pace
dependent on the distance to Copenhagen. But is generic du then a new
phenomenon at all, as public opinion has it? To assess this question we have to
study older data, and we therefore turn to Mortensen’s 1970 recordings (see
above). In these data there are 2217 tokens of pronouns with generic
reference, but only 13 of these (i.e. about 0.6%) are occurrences of du. These
13 occurrences are roughly evenly distributed among the two age groups in
the data (born in 1915 and 1945). There is no indication of an ongoing
change in that period. We conclude that generic du was practically non-

existent in 1970, and that the rise in the use of this variant must have started
in Copenhagen in the period between 1970 and the late 1980s.
Raised short a
Comparability is a major issue for any study of real-time change. Since the
original studies varied considerably in scope, aims and methods, all data has
been coded for discourse context (for details, see Gregersen, Maegaard and
Pharao 2009; Gregersen and Barner-Rasmussen 2011). The discourse context
analysis forms the basis of the phonetic analysis: for the sake of consequence
only passages delimited as belonging to the macro speech act of ‘Exchange of
Information’ have been coded for phonetic variation. The grammatical
analysis of generic pronouns was carried out on entire conversations, as
described above, due to the lower frequency of the variable. Thus, in the case of
generic pronouns, priority was given to frequency rather than to discourse
context in order to facilitate statistical analysis of the data.
The coding of (æ) was carried out by trained listeners who classified fully
stressed tokens of the variable. The variable has two primary variants, [e] and
[æ], but coders could indicate when they heard a variant as more extreme than
either of the two primary variants, i.e. higher than [e], or lower than [æ], and
also when they could not decide on a specific classification (due to background
noise, or other problems). Tokens were classified independently by two
listeners, and their classifications were reviewed by a third listener. In cases of
disagreement, the third listener made the final decision. Fifty tokens of the
variable were classified, which resulted in at least 40 coded tokens per speaker
when problematic occurrences had been removed.
The statistical analysis of the (æ)-variation followed the same procedure as
described above for generic du. The (æ)-data consists of 13,506 tokens, and the
factors that were incorporated into the statistical analysis are: Birth year,
Gender, Social class, Locality and Time of recording (ToRec).
The overall proportion of [e] in the corpus is only nine percent, and contrary
to expectations Copenhageners are not the most frequent users (cf. Appen-
dix 3). Again, we used R’s glmer-function, and included the speaker
(Participant) as a random factor. Through the analysis and comparison of
possible models and the use of model criticism (Baayen 2008) we reached the
model which most accurately describes the variation in the data given the
factors we included in the study (cf. Appendix 4). Figure 5 shows the model
effects, i.e. the probability of [e] estimated by the model as a function of a
(statistically significant) factor when all other factors are kept constant. The
model shows that all significant factors interact with another factor. In
Figure 5, interacting factors are shown together.4
The model shows that the [e] variant is not increasing in use. In the plot of
interactions between Locality and ToRec, the use of [e] remains more or less

20 MAEGAARD ET AL.
stable from the 1980s to the 2000s in Copenhagen, Næstved, and Odder,
whereas Vinderup presents a significant decrease. This pattern is illuminated
by the plot of interactions between Birth year and Locality, which clearly
shows a large age-related difference in the use of [e] in Vinderup, whereas the
age effect on the use of this variant is far more limited in the other locations,
especially in Copenhagen and Odder. However, in all locations, except for
Odder, age is a significant factor. Moreover, the age effect is stronger in the
1980s recordings than in the 2000s recordings, with older speakers using
more [e] than younger speakers at both points in time (see the plot of
interaction between Birth year and ToRec). This indicates that the use of [e] is
stagnating, and that the frequency is stabilizing at a lower level.
It should be noted that there are large differences in the effect of the different
factors. The interaction between Birth year and Locality is much stronger than
the other interactions as can be seen from the plots (Figure 5). This means that
there are large differences in the effect of the speakers’ year of birth across
localities. In Vinderup it has a strong effect, whereas in the other localities the
effect is relatively small (and in Odder it is non-significant, as mentioned
above).
In sum, these analyses suggest that there has been a decrease in the use of
[e] at all locations, so that younger speakers use less [e] variants than older
Birth year (Centered, 0=1970) Birth year (Centered, 0=1970)

Figure 5: Mixed model effects, [e]

speakers. Furthermore, in Vinderup the use of [e] was significantly higher in

the 1980s than in the 2000s. Vinderup stands out as the locality where
speakers have been the slowest to decrease the use of raised variants. Given the
peripheral location of Vinderup (far from Copenhagen), the small size of the
town, and the above analysis of variation in generic pronouns, it is no surprise
that Vinderup lags behind in this development.
The analysis of (æ)-variation across time and space suggests that the use of
[e] is in decline. This is contrary to the public belief that the use of ‘flat a’ is
increasing, especially in Copenhagen. This may have to do with earlier
developments of this variable. To get an indication of the position of this
variable before the 1980s we analyze the use of this variable in the
supplementary Mortensen Copenhagen dataset from 1970. We have analyzed
these data with the same statistical methods, see Figure 6.
The analysis resulted in a model where the factors Birth year and Social class
have significant effects, and furthermore interact (cf. Appendix 5). Among
speakers born in 1915, the (æ)-variation correlates with social class, [e] being
more common among working-class speakers, whereas social class has no
effect among speakers born in 1945. Furthermore, the use of [e] among the
working-class speakers born in 1915 reaches 20 percent, which is a higher
percentage than any other subgroup in the LANCHART corpus. We conclude
that there are good reasons for assuming that a more frequent use of [e] has
Figure 6: Proportions of [e] in the 1970 Mortensen data set, on social factors, and
overall (overall N=1,970; MC=middle class; WC=working class)

22 MAEGAARD ET AL.
indeed been a Copenhagen working-class characteristic – which had peaked

already prior to the time of the earliest recordings in the LANCHART corpus.
REVERSED DIRECTION OF CHANGE

The result of our analysis of a-raising can be interpreted in the same way as the
result of our analysis of generic du: the use of [e] increases in Copenhagen and
spreads from there to speakers in the rest of the country. In the case of (æ), the
phase of increase cannot be attested directly since it happened prior to the time
of our earliest recordings. However, there is support for the claim in the
literature (e.g. Brink and Lund 1975; Jørgensen 1980), and our analysis of the
1970 Mortensen dataset strengthens this further. The two variables seem to
represent change that switches direction: an initial increase in the use of a
variant is later followed by a decrease. The important point in our analyses is
that both tendencies, the increase as well as the decrease, spread from
Copenhagen, and that speakers in the rest of the country follow the
developments in Copenhagen with some delay.
The abstract model in Figure 7 illustrates the anatomy of a change in
progress which is reversed. At some point in time, a ‘norm centre’
(Copenhagen) changes its use of a variable without losing its lead over other
localities (the LANCHART sites) which continue to follow it as a ‘target’. The
graph indicates the amount of generic du and short (æ), in each of the four
localities at two points in time (T1 and T2). Copenhagen is in the lead, whether
the process is an increase or a decrease in use of the variant. The use of generic
du increased throughout the 1970s and 1980s; it probably peaked in the
1980s, and this was followed by a decrease from the late 1980s. The same
interpretation is relevant for the use of [e], with the modification that the peak
has happened prior to what we can document in our recordings.
In most cases, the diffusion of sound changes in Denmark can be described
as an s-curve, illustrating the increase in use of a particular variant as a
change that goes to completion. However, here we have presented two
examples of developments that progress in a very different way. We can point
to no obvious reason why the increase movement turns into a decrease
movement in these two variables. More importantly in our connection,
Figure 7: Abstract model of ‘Accommodation to a moving target’ – the amount of

generic du and short (æ), in each of the four localities at two points in time (T1 and T2)

however, we would like to suggest that such cases, where the rest of the
country follows Copenhagen’s move first up and then down, constitute
irrefutable evidence for Copenhagen’s leading role (at least stronger evidence
than cases where the s-curves continue ‘upwards’ to completion).
A STUDY OF THE WHY

Irrespective of whether the change is of the wave-type or cascade-type, the
driving force seems to be more readily understood in much sociolinguistics as
‘mechanical’ as long as the innovation advances, and as psychological as soon
as the advance in some way or other is impeded. For instance, Britain (2002:
168) says about
the supposed rampant advance of Estuary English [that] some of its features seem
to be eradicating traditional forms (levelling), others are ‘renegotiated’ during the
koineization process at a local level (interdialectalization) […], others are
rejected, reacted against, or at least slowed down, by local social, spatial,
linguistic, attitudinal, and other factors.
Sometimes, Britain says, innovations diffuse against the urban hierarchy in
contrahierarchial diffusion (or upstream diffusion – another water metaphor)
‘possibly for reasons of identity-marking and the rejection of incoming forms
and the values they represent’ (Britain 2002: 626). Likewise, Bailey et al.
(1993: 385) find that the instances of contrahierarchical diffusion in their data
‘involve the spread of features that reassert traditional speech norms. They
serve to demarcate natives from newcomers to an area and are badges of
identity with the local culture’.
The role of attitudes and social identity is foregrounded in the process which
Britain calls ‘supralocalization of dialects’ and which leads to the formation of
‘a smaller number of geographically expansive regiolects’ (Britain 2010a: 152).
In the case of the U.K., Britain talks about Estuary English as one such
emerging regiolect in southern-eastern England, and says that ‘at some levels it
shows considerable linguistic homogenization, but at others provides examples
of considerable linguistic diversity. […] the dialect patterns of the south-east of
England exemplify that supralocal homogeneity is far from complete’ (Britain
2010a: 153–154). In the case of Denmark, the development over the past
decades has created a nationwide homogeneity which is close to being
complete except for the prosodic level. As pointed out by Pedersen (2003: 26) a
handful of phonological variants have been regionally expansive in western
Denmark, but the ‘regional identity’ function of these variants is unclear.
Studies of overt attitudes among Danish adolescents – as expressed when
they are aware of giving away attitudes to language varieties – show, as the
average result in any locality, a strong preference for the local dialect in
comparison with Copenhagen ways with language in general, and the Modern
version of it in particular. This evaluative pattern is in harmony with what is

24 MAEGAARD ET AL.
found in readily available public discourse, but in clear contradiction to what

happens at the level of language use. So, overt attitudes seem to have no
impact on how language is used.
The picture looks quite different, however, when people are not aware of giving
language attitudes away. The covert values that are associated with Danish
accents have been studied in a series of speaker evaluation experiments in
Denmark over the past 25 years. The design has been based on the Verbal Guise
Technique and has succeeded in collecting subconsciously offered attitudes to the
three accents of Copenhagen speech which is part of everyday life in any Danish
locality – namely Conservative, Modern, and Local. These studies all show the
same pattern. Here we present results for adolescents in the LANCHART
communities, based on attitudinal data collected in 2005–2006 (Figure 8).
The curves in Figure 8 represent the mean scores on eight personality traits
for the three accents, which were represented by four voices each. The Local
voices in Næstved were from Næstved; in Vissenbjerg the Local voices were from
nearby Odense (the third largest city in Denmark); in Odder from nearby Århus
(the second largest city in Denmark); and in Vinderup from nearby Holstebro –
the idea being that the town itself (in the case of Næstved) or the nearby bigger
city or town (in the other cases) may play the role of a linguistic norm centre in
its region, possibly setting an ideological, local self-esteem barrier for the
advance of Copenhagen speech. The Conservative and Modern voices were the
same in all communities and belonged to adolescents from Copenhagen.
In Figure 8 we see that Local speech, which in most cases will represent the
speech of the adolescents themselves, is downgraded on all scales in
comparison with Conservative and Modern, and in an amazingly similar
fashion in all four communities. One might suspect, perhaps, that other and
arguably more solidarity-stressing traits would yield better results for Local
speech. Results from previous experiments have shown, however, that this
pattern is obtained irrespective of which personality traits are used for defining
the scales. Variation or change in the social-value perspective does not in any
way influence the relative downgrading of Local speech. What matters in the
evaluations, is whether judges are aware of the object of study or not.
Thus, in contrast to the overt attitudes, the covert evaluations show no trace
of a local linguistic pride. The covert patterns are in contradiction with public
discourse in these matters, but in clear harmony with what happens at the
level of language use. Arguably, the covert patterns indicate that ideology is a
driving force behind the advance of Copenhagen speech. (For a detailed
presentation of the LANCHART attitudes studies, see Kristiansen 2009.)
However, we may still find indications of an identity-driven regionalization of
ways of speaking. Even if all traces, also prosodic colouring, were eradicated from
local speech, we could still imagine that regiolects could emerge, either as locally
selected subsets of the total pool of variants which diffuses with Copenhagen
speech, or as systematic and geographically delimited frequency differences in
the use of the same Copenhagen pool of variants. In either case, for these
Figure 8: Subconscious evaluations of Conservative (thin black curve), Modern

(thick black curve) and Local (grey curve) in the five LANCHART communities.
Entities on the X-axis are the eight measurement scales (personality traits) which,
based on the evaluative patterns can be grouped into four ‘superiority’ scales (1–4)
and four ‘dynamism’ scales (5–8). Values on the Y-axis are means on the 7-point-
measurement-scales. A low value (high placement in the graphs) is a more positive
evaluation (in the sense that intelligent is positive and stupid negative, etc.)
differences to count as regiolects, we should be able to establish independent

empirical evidence that they are evaluated more positively than other ways with
Copenhagen speech – while, at the same time, also being recognized as local ways
of speaking. Kristiansen (1991) actually found that Næstved voices without
‘extreme’ High and Low Copenhagen features, and without any trace of local
prosody, were evaluated more positively by Næstved adolescents than ‘genuine’
Copenhagen voices. However, subsequent recognition tests showed that these
26 MAEGAARD ET AL.
Næstved voices were categorized as Copenhageners. This showed that the

evaluative pattern was not a testimony to the existence of a subset of Copenhagen
variants with a Næstved-identity function (Kristiansen 2000).
Finally, one could argue that a change in the social evaluation of an innovation as
it spreads in itself represents regiolect formation – in particular, perhaps if the
change somehow can be interpreted as an upgrading in terms of social hierarchy
and prestige. This seems to be the argument in the already mentioned example of
stereotypically ‘low’ London variants which are seen as ‘sophisticated
and fashionable speech’ as they spread to Cardiff and Newcastle (Britain
2010a: 149), although we think that these evaluations need to be documented
by independently established empirical evidence. (If not, we may become guilty of
circular argumentation: in Cardiff, ‘low’ London variants mean ‘sophisticated
and fashionable’, because ‘sophisticated and fashionable’ people are the more
frequent users.) In the Danish case we present here, one could imagine that the
assessment of Conservative and Modern by adolescents would be different in the
various local communities and different from the assessment by adolescents in
Copenhagen – and that these different local valuations could be seen as
regiolects. However, again we see in Figure 8 an amazingly similar picture in all
communities. Modern is everywhere strongly upgraded on dynamic values, while
Conservative does as well or better on superiority values.5
In general, adolescents across Denmark know exactly how the Copenhagen
variation is covertly assessed by their Copenhagen peers, and they reproduce
this evaluation to such a degree that the resulting graphs look like copies of the
Copenhagen graph. At the level of covert social evaluation, homogenization
appears to be ‘completed’, while it is less advanced at the level of use: despite
the far-reaching reduction of dialectal diversity, accentual variation (Local/
Conservative/Modern) does exist among young Danes, and our analyses of the (a)
and (du/man) variables show that the copying of Copenhagen happens with
some delay. What is the significance of that finding in relation to the issue of the
role of covert ideology in language change? Arguably, the situation indicates that
the spread of covert ideology precedes the spread of use, and that covert ideology
is the driving force behind the general advance of Copenhagen speech among
young people, with Modern being particularly favoured as dynamic speech. (As
already mentioned, Kammacher et al. (2011) present an analysis based on
LANCHART data, which supports the covert-attitudes-precede-use view.)
INFLUENCE FROM THE MEDIA?

We will allow ourselves to add a paragraph with speculations about the role of
the modern media in the development we have described for language use and
language ideology in Denmark. It has been common within sociolinguistics to
assume that media which transmit sound are not important factors in
language change (e.g. Trudgill 1986: 40; Labov 2001: 385). Chambers (1998)
argues along these lines that it is a ‘language myth’ that media have any
influence at all on phonological and grammatical changes. However, as Bell

and Gibson (2011: 559) put it: ‘as media become ever more embedded in day-
to-day experience, it seems increasingly likely that there are circulating
relationships between performed and everyday language’.
Indeed, to us it has become rather difficult to understand why ‘no influence
from the media’ should be the default view of a sociolinguistic theory of
language change. Does face-to-face interaction seem the most obvious answer
when we ask ourselves how Figure 8 comes about? To us, the nationwide
uniformity in how adolescents subconsciously evaluate the Conservative/Modern/
Local variation is hard to explain as not stemming from common experiences
with the use and valuation of language in the traditional sound-transmitting
media. In Denmark the national television stations and radio channels are
totally dominated by Copenhagen speech (and English). In this sense, we see our
results as an argument in favour of the view that the media today play an
important role in the spread of changes (Coupland and Kristiansen 2011;
Stuart-Smith 2011, forthcoming). However, as the evaluations reported here
are given by young language users, it is unclear how much these media mean in
their everyday lives. It is possible that the younger generation is in fact
influenced by direct person-to-person exchange, although not face-to-face
interaction, in that the new social fora which are mediated through the internet,
exert a more important influence on the younger speakers. However, everything
points to such an influence going in the exact same direction as described above.
As a counterargument it is often pointed out that if (mass)media played a
role in language change, then every population would be affected the same
way, and the dialect diversity found in many speech communities today would
not exist (e.g. Chambers 1998). Instead standardization would take place
uniformly across communities. However, this argument rests on two assump-
tions which in our view are difficult to defend. First, the argument assumes
that all media in all communities favour and promote only ‘the standard’ (like
in Denmark). This is clearly not the case; and it is an interesting question
whether the media more generally are undergoing changes in this respect
under late-modern conditions (Kristiansen and Coupland 2011). Second, the
argument assumes that individuals are being passively influenced and more or
less automatically replace their variants with the ones heard in the media. If
media consumption, in contrast, is an activity that individuals engage in in
different ways and to various degrees (Stuart-Smith 2011: 227ff.), then
processes of media influence become much more complex and the outcomes
more difficult to predict. We should notice that what we have presented in this
paper are evaluative patterns belonging at the ideological macro-level of
society. Even though the ‘peripheral’ reproductions of the ‘central’ evaluations
in our Danish data do, in fact, look more like the results of ‘automatic
imitation’ than of ‘creative appropriation’, it is both possible and probable that
the Copenhagen speech variation plays different roles among adolescents in
different communities as they develop their language practices at the meso-
28 MAEGAARD ET AL.
and micro-levels of social life, in social psychological processes of group and

identity formation. Research into this issue belongs to the future.
CONCLUSION
Our results regarding the two questions – the how and the why of diffusion
patterns – allow for two basic conclusions. One evident conclusion is that
Copenhagen is the sole centre of diffusion of nationwide changes, as hypothesized
by current sociolinguistic literature about Danish. This pertains to change which
increases the use of a given variant, and it pertains to a reversal of the change.
The orientation of speakers nationwide is centred on Copenhagen, and the
linguistic adaptation taking place follows Copenhagen speech both in expansion
and in attrition. We could think of this as a ‘moving target’ model of change, or a
‘flow and ebb’ model if we stick to the water metaphors.
With the data available in this study we cannot determine whether a wave
model or a cascade model best captures the development of linguistic spread in
such a mono-centric society. Because their population size decreases as their
distance from Copenhagen increases (see Table 1 and Figure 1) the most
important factor in the delay of spread to the four studied localities may be related
to either distance or population size, or both may be of importance. We cannot tell.
However, as the flow and ebb movement which occurs in the ‘centre’ is repeated
in the ‘periphery’, we can reject a hypothesis about upstream developments (at
least with respect to the two variables we have studied in this paper).
A second conclusion is that there are strong indications that the diffusion
happening in Denmark at this time is driven by social psychological, or
ideological, factors. In other words, Copenhagen is not only the centre of
language change, but also a centre of ideological attention, clearly evidenced
in the patterns of evaluations found in the young generation nationwide. This
finding supports the theory that the far-reaching dialect levelling which has
characterized Denmark since World War II is a pure ‘Copenhagenization’ of the
Danish speech community, while it simultaneously supports the theory which
proposes that the driving force behind this ‘Copenhagenization’ is the social
evaluations which attach to the competing linguistic varieties. Even though
our study does not specifically document that ideological factors drive the
specific changes we focus on, the results do support the theory that ideological
factors at least contribute to motivating language change as such.
In addition we have hinted at the possibility of including media influence in the
interpretation of our results. Even though this is not uncontroversial, we argued
that recent findings and theoretical developments within sociolinguistics make it
worthwhile to consider including media as a factor in linguistic change. The
patterns of langue use and attitudes presented in this paper are hard to explain as
a consequence of processes involving only face-to-face interaction. While media
influence seems a more plausible explanation, we certainly do recognize the need
for more research in order to consolidate and qualify this claim.
NOTES
1. LANCHART (Language Change in Real Time) is a centre of excellence financed
by the Danish National Research Foundation and located at the University of
Copenhagen (http://lanchart.hum.ku.dk/).
2. R version 2.14.0, Package lme4 version 0.999375-42.
3. We have used the plotLMER.fnc-function for the plots (Package languageR
version 1.2). The predicted probabilities presupposes that all the other factors are
kept at their default levels which are Subject=No, Ref2=No, Conditional=No,
Locality=Copenhagen, ToRec=1980s, Social class=MC, Gender=Female.
4. The predicted probabilities presuppose that all the other factors are kept at their
default levels which are: Locality=Copenhagen, ToRec=1980s, Social class=MC,
Gender=Female.
5. The first language attitude investigations of this kind in Denmark date back to
the late 1980s and operated with personality traits that were assumed to
represent competence (status) vs. sociability (solidarity). Results did show,
however, not only that Local was generally downgraded but also that the scales
were ‘regrouped’ into a superiority/dynamism distinction by differential
evaluation of Modern and Conservative Copenhagen speech (see Kristiansen
2001). This ‘regrouping’ has been confirmed in all later studies.
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APPENDIX 1: Proportions of generic du – on linguistic factors, social factors, and

overall. The categories used in the left side of the figure are explained in the text

34 MAEGAARD ET AL.
APPENDIX 2: Variation in the data due to factors included in the study
Factor Level Estimate p
Intercept 1.186901 2.31e-05

Subject Yes 1.630883 <2e-16
Ref2 Yes 0.127117 0.011229
Conditional Yes 0.476992 3.07e-12
Locality Næstved 0.940624 0.011345
Odder 1.846007 1.13e-06
Vinderup 2.843652 1.72e-08
ToRec 2000s 0.387320 5.24e-05
Social class WC 0.241348 non-sig
Gender Male 0.300126 non-sig
Birth year (centered) 0.047710 7.06e-13
Subject by Locality Yes:Næstved 0.002656 0.989917
Yes:Odder 0.437942 0.030198
Yes:Vinderup 0.920839 0.000182
Locality by Ref2 Næstved:Yes 0.443948 2.64e-06
Odder:Yes 0.253286 0.021616
Vinderup:Yes 0.446186 0.000659
Conditional by ToRec Yes:2000s 0.199199 0.015458
ToRec by Social class 2000s:WC 0.440704 2.17e-07
ToRec by Gender 2000s:Male 0.499206 1.81e-08
Locality by ToRec Næstved:2000s 0.334669 0.002352
Odder:2000s 0.906076 7.81e-09
Vinderup:2000s 2.359401 3.88e-13
Number of observations: 31,908; participants: 228

Random effect: participant (intercept); variance 2.187; std. deviation 1.4788
The goodness of fit of the model is acceptable with a concordance statistic C of 0.81 and a
Somers’ Dxy of 0.62

APPENDIX 3: Proportions of [e] – on social factors, and overall (overall N =

13,506)
N
Copenhagen 4,857
Naestved 3,267
Locality Odder 3,300
Vinderup 2,082
Female 7,184
Gender Male 6,322
Social class MC 6,375

WC 7,131
[1942,1958] 3,733
Birth year [1958,1967] 3,191
[1967,1991] 3,424
[1991,1994] 3,158
ToRec 1980s 4,143

2000s 9,363
Overall 13,506
0.04 0.06 0.08 0.10 0.12 0.14

Proportion of raised a
APPENDIX 4: Variation in the data due to factors included in the study
Intercept 3.56745 < 2e-16

Locality Næstved 0.02280 non-sig
Odder 1.02808 0.011935
Vinderup 1.19112 0.012432
ToRec 2000s 0.42990 0.009004
Social class WC 0.65819 0.047375
Birth year (centered) 0.04492 0.001682
ToRec by Locality 2000s:Næstved 0.02251 non-sig
2000s:Odder 0.58545 0.006816
2000s:Vinderup 1.00240 0.000242
Locality by Social class Næstved:WC 1.16986 0.030260
Odder:WC 1.04554 0.036768
Vinderup:WC 0.90054 non-sig

36 MAEGAARD ET AL.
APPENDIX 4 (Continued)
Locality by Birth year Næstved 0.05322 0.000393

Odder 0.02348 non-sig
Vinderup 0.07976 0.000271
ToRec by Birth year 2000s 0.03436 0.001428
Number of obs: 13506, Participants: 228

Random effect: Participant (intercept), Variance 1.4189, Std. deviation 1.1912
Somers DXY of 0.65
APPENDIX 5: Variation in the data due to factors in the study
Intercept 3.2286 < 2e-16

Social class WC 1.4924 0.00128
Birth year 1945 1.0382 0.04409
Social class by Birth year WC:1945 1.3822 0.04576
Number of obs. 1,970; number of participants 45

Random effect: participant (intercept); variance 0.92008; std. deviation 0.95921
Somers DXY of 0.59
Address correspondence to:

Marie Maegaard
Department of Scandinavian Research & the LANCHART Centre
University of Copenhagen
Njalsgade 136
DK - 2300 Copenhagen S
Denmark
mamae@hum.ku.dk

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Journal of Sociolinguistics 17/1, 2013: 3–36

Diffusion of language change:

Marie Maegaard, Torben Juel Jensen, Tore Kristiansen

KEYWORDS: Language change, real time, grammatical variation,

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

terms of both the mundane life paths of individuals in their communities

THE DANISH CONTEXT

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

Figure 1: The LANCHART communities placed on a map of Denmark (Copenhagen,

Jørgensen and Kristensen (1995) have modeled the spread of Copenhagen

The LANCHART project and corpus

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

Table 1: Number of inhabitants in the four interview sites

Locality Number of inhabitants

Greater Copenhagen 2,000,000

1940 1960 1980 2000 1940 1960 1980 2000

1940 1960 1980 2000 1940 1960 1980 2000

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

decades, possibly as a result of influence from English. The generic use of du

Pronunciation of the short a

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

CHANGE IN TIME AND SPACE

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

The overall proportion of du in the data is 16 percent. The rest of the

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

Figure 3: Mixed model effects, generic du

Figure 4: Mixed model effect of locality and time of recording, generic du

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

These interactions with time of recording all point in the direction of an

change in that period. We conclude that generic du was practically non-

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

Birth year (Centered, 0=1970) Birth year (Centered, 0=1970)

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

speakers. Furthermore, in Vinderup the use of [e] was significantly higher in

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

indeed been a Copenhagen working-class characteristic – which had peaked

REVERSED DIRECTION OF CHANGE

Figure 7: Abstract model of ‘Accommodation to a moving target’ – the amount of

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

A STUDY OF THE WHY

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

found in readily available public discourse, but in clear contradiction to what

Figure 8: Subconscious evaluations of Conservative (thin black curve), Modern

differences to count as regiolects, we should be able to establish independent

Næstved voices were categorized as Copenhageners. This showed that the

INFLUENCE FROM THE MEDIA?

influence at all on phonological and grammatical changes. However, as Bell

and micro-levels of social life, in social psychological processes of group and

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

of the Ninth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (volume II). Copenhagen,

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

APPENDIX 1: Proportions of generic du – on linguistic factors, social factors, and

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2013

APPENDIX 2: Variation in the data due to factors included in the study

Factor Level Estimate p

Intercept 1.186901 2.31e-05