Language attitudes, norm and gender a presentation of the method and results from a language attitude study

Abstract

This paper deals with the more traditional sociolinguistic area of language attitudes. Based on data from the city of Århus, Denmark, I discuss the methods used in speaker evaluation experiments. The paper presents both a methodological discussion and the results of a study using the described techniques. The method is a mainly qualitative version of ‘the verbal guise technique’, and involves young people in Århus. Twelve speech samples (six female and six male voices) were used for this experiment, representing three different accents. The aim is to investigate the possibility of the Århus accent being a linguistic norm ideal among the young people in Århus. The results show that this does not seem to be the case, and that speakers are evaluated differently according to both accent and gender.