January 2010
Dear friends
I would like to begin this first newsletter of 2010 with an excuse. In my previous, mid-December newsletter from climate-focussing Copenhagen, I expressed hopes for the future not only of SLICE but all kinds of ice. As far as the latter, snow and ice, are concerned, I regret and apologize for any inconvenience the resulting amounts of this stuff may have caused you since then.
All that snow created excellent conditions, the best ever, for my skiing ambitions during three Xmas/New Years weeks in the Norwegian mountains, but the accompanying and stable cold forced a cross-country racer like myself to stay indoors and watch the TV-transmitted Tour de ski instead. The sociolinguistic hot spots of Tynset and Roeros (studied in Unn’s PhD) popped up on the TV screen with temperatures below 40 degrees (Celsius) day after day. Back in Denmark and Naestved, I can report that my garden has been dressed in white snow during all of January, for the first time since I moved here 30 years ago.
May my conjurations regarding the future of SLICE be as effective!
Welcome to a new SLICE community: Lithuania
From Lithuania, Loreta Vaicekauskiene has joined our SLICE group with a strong engagement in endeavours to develop the study of language standardisation issues in her country. She has sent the following words to the SLICE newsletter:
Standard Lithuanian is a late dialect selection standard from the end of the XIX century, historically related not to upper-class speech but to literary elite (more about the typology of European standard languages see Subacius 2002 http://www.uic.edu/classes/lith/lith410/SUB_two_types.pdf). In terms of ideology Lithuanian should be classified as a (very) strong standard type, because of a rather unique tradition of prescriptivism, based on strongly institutionalized monitoring of public speech and writing. Besides language standardization ideology in Lithuania can be characterized as an interesting mixture of national romanticism/idealism and postsovietism (postsoviet way of authorities using power). Nevertheless the development of the language in Lithuanian media is following the same direction towards democratization of public speech as elsewhere. At the same time more and more intellectuals express discontentment with the conservative language policy.
Experimental strand
Reports on progress in experimental strand work have been pouring in like snow in January.
Ireland
From Ireland, Tadhg writes as follows:
Noel is about half way through his fieldwork. I have some more experimental work planned for April, and I hope that in the near future we will be able to move the project outside of this province too to look at the widely held perception among Irish speakers and non-speakers (i.e. ex-school learners and the general English-dominant public) that the Donegal dialects of Ulster Irish are very different to all the other varieties in the country and very far from the standard - which from a scientific standpoint seem to be false assumptions. This is important as about 30 to 40% of Irish native speakers speak a northern variety. There is a second aspect which we hope to look at too, observed in linguistic studies intermittently since the 1950s, and one which we all know anecdotally - that the more southern a dialect is perceived to be, the more prestigious it is assumed to be, but yet that doesn't mean that every sector of Irish-speaking society mimics a more southern speech than their own, except perhaps in North Connacht, where Mayo Irish has observably shifted to a more southern type in the last two generations. Quite a programme, if we can find funding and good people to help us along.
Germany
From Germany, Christoph sends the design of his pilot studies (see attached files [1, 2]) which are about to take off.
Norway
The Bergen group continues their impressive data collection which now, in addition to the localities of Oygarden and Midsund, covers a number of central and peripheral areas of the city of Bergen. The attached overview from Bergen is in Norwegian but gives you an idea.
Media strand
Denmark
As a member of the LARM consortium (http://larm.hum.ku.dk/), the LANCHART centre has obtained funding for a 3-year post doc position which will be used for a project on language politics/ideology in the national radio.
The first SLICE book
Nik and I recently sent out invitations to write for the book we agreed upon as a good idea at EW2 in August. The book will consist of two parts. The first part will be ‘country reports’. The second part will be more oriented towards theoretical and methodological issues. The invitation and guidelines for part one contributions (which are attached to this mail) were sent to selected ‘Principal Investigators’ (one for each community) with the request that they take on the responsibility of finding and deciding on the author(s) for the report about their community. Within less then a week we have received conformations from most of our SLICE communities that this will be taken care of.
NORDCORP (see attachment)
The deadline for applying funding from this program (it is the one I mentioned in the November newsletter) is March 25. I am afraid the program gives money only to research in the Nordic countries. But I hope all PIs in the Nordic countries will want to be involved in sending in an application. I shall send you a draft before long.
February 2010
Dear friends
February is too short! These belated end-of-February news is a deliberate protest against the vexing shortness of this month.
The most exiting news of the month is that several of us received the message that what we had proposed for SS 18 in Southamton (September 1-4, 2010) was accepted. I have heard of two thematic panels on language attitudes involving people from our SLICE group (one organised by Barbara Soukup, and one organised by Stef Grondelaers and myself). There may be more?
Christoph will present his German SLICE project as a poster.
More at the end of March.
March 2010
Dear friends
Just a couple of good news for you at the end of March:
First of all, it is my pleasure to welcome new friends to our SLICE framework – Jannis Androutsopoulos, Allan Bell, Jane Stuart-Smith, and Wim Vandenbussche – who all have said yes to contribute a chapter to Part II of our forthcoming first SLICE book. In addition, Part II will include 3 or 4 contributions from old SLICE friends.
[And let me take the opportunity to remind you that the ‘country reports’ for Part I are due no later than June 15].
Second, ‘SLICE Nordic’ (including Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Swedish-speaking Finland, Finnish-speaking Finland, and Denmark) has just submitted an application to NOS-HS (which also funded our Exploratory Workshops) for a four-year project which, in case we are successful, will allow us to realize the Experimental Strand in all of the Nordic communities (unfortunately, non-Nordic countries were not eligible). I attach the project proposal; it might be useful to you in case you find local opportunities to apply for funding (you will of course recognize large parts of it from previous texts that have been circulated).
I know the Norwegians live up to their national character and have already disappeared on ski in the mountains, but to the rest of you: Enjoy your well-earned Easter break!
April 2010
Dear friends
April was the month when all early birds remembered (with a little help from their friends – at least in my own case) to register for SS 18 in Southampton, September 1–4.
I am looking much forward to seeing many of you there.
The big news this month was a massive exodus of Copenhagen LANCHART people to Freiburg FRIAS. The meeting was organized by Danish SLICE envoy in Freiburg, Christoph, who has it as his duty, as part of the ‘internationalization programme’ that finances his PhD, to organize a couple of such seminars gathering colleagues from his two institutions. During 3 days (13th – 15th) we presented and discussed and had a very good time in every respect. Well done, Christoph! And many thanks to all our colleagues and friends in Freiburg!
Tomorrow I’ll leave for Norway and meetings with the very active SLICE-related group in Bergen. More about that in the next issue.
May 2010
Dear friends
In Denmark, May normally is a month filled with sunshine and warm winds from the east. Not so this year. Winds have been westerly and filled with rain, lots of rain.
They say it always rains in Bergen. It does not. When I was there in the first week of May, the sun was out all day and up long into the night.
Experimental strand news
More good news from Bergen: SLICE type experimental data collection has now been brought to a successful end in Oygarden, Bergen and Midsund, and data analyses are in progress. Results will soon appear.
Furthermore, the Bergen group reported just a couple of days ago that the preparations for data collection in and around Stavanger were terminated. Collections were scheduled for this week, but may have to be postponed to after the summer holidays as half of Norway is on strike these days.
From Germany, Christoph tells that he hopes to have finished most of his data collection in and around Stuttgart before the summer holidays.
In Denmark, we recently reorganized our language attitudes group at the LANCHART centre and plan to carry out a series of different experiments with the aim of qualifying our statements about the relative role played by various linguistic features in social evaluation.
Decision on our proposal for NOS-HS funding of SLICE Nordic is expected in the beginning of October.
Media strand news
In Denmark, there were several applicants for the post doc position which I told about in an appendix mail to the End of February newsletter. The selection process will be brought to an end shortly, and the person selected will begin working at the end of August.
I know that quite a number of applications have been submitted for funding of projects which somehow relate to the SLICE media strand programme. I think it might be helpful to have an overview and will try to make one for the End of June newsletter. Please do not hesitate to mail me about local initiatives.
Deadline for ‘country reports’
Those of you who are involved in writing the ‘country reports’ for part 1 of our first SLICE book will appreciate learning that Nik and I look forward to receiving your texts by June 15.
June 2010
Dear friends
I hope that summer finally has arrived in your corners of Europe, too, and that I shall receive lots of automatic I-am-on-holiday responses to this End of June newsletter. However, I promised to put together and send you an overview of initiatives that somehow relate to what we have called the media strand of our endeavour.
From Lithuania...
Giedrius Tamasevicius (Vytautas Magnus University – Institute for Lithuanian language) writes about his PhD project Colloquialisation of Lithuanian public discourse:
I am now beginning the third year of my doctoral studies (In Lithuania doctoral studies take 4 years: 2 first years for examinations and work with theoretical framework, 2 last years for the project). So I am just beginning to collect and analyze the data.
Pervasiveness of informal, colloquial style (vocabulary, prosodic features, and syntax) in public speech of leading politicians and journalists is observable in several years. The purist tradition of standard Lithuanian charge such public speakers with digression of norms and vulgar language. But the observation of use shows, that many of them are able to use both codes (formal, normative standard and a kind of informal standard). In my PhD project I will analyze the use of informal vocabulary in Lithuanian public spoken discourse (TV and radio talk show programmes). The central research questions are:
- Why the leading journalists and politicians sometimes prefer to use variants of colloquial vocabulary instead of their standard synonyms?
- What is the relation of language use in Lithuanian public discourse to the norms of Lithuanian conservative standard language?
The sociolinguistic theory of speech accommodation says, that the politicians or journalists converge towards the speech of their audience (audience design) in the mass media and there for they use also non standard linguistic features in official, public circumstances (Bell 1997). It implies that the public speakers can code-switch, that they are able to use both standard and casual language (f. ex. language of youth).
Disappearing boundaries between public and private spheres in Western societies are being described for several decades ago by Jürgen Habermas (Habermas 1962). The leading role in this process plays the media, first of all television. The commercialisation of the broadcast influences the language of the media. It has to entertain and speak the same language as ordinary people speak (Fairclough 1995). It explains the use of colloquial vocabulary, syntax, citation etc. (process called by N. Fairclough conversationalisation).
In Eastern Europe similar linguistic processes are correlated with democratisation of post-soviet societies and overcoming of old taboos of totalitarian system (f. ex. the purist norms of standard language). Many Russian, Polish and Czech linguists analyse this invasion of new loanwords, vulgarisms, colloquialisms and slang in public discourse as a part of the process of liberalisation of society. (Chimik 2004, Warchol-Schlottmann 2004).
I’m collecting audio and video recordings of TV and radio talk show programmes from both national and commercial Lithuanian broadcasting stations.
My goal is to collect about 20 hours of recordings. 50 % of them will be the programmes with more academic, serious target audience. The rest – the programmes with younger, non academic target audience (for entertainment).
For the analysis I will select and transcribe the speeches of leading Lithuanian journalists (hosts or guests) and politicians, where the colloquial words or expressions (incl. slang words, foreign words, swearing words, colloquial idioms, quotations, grammatical forms) were used. Analysis will include following tasks:
- description of the conditions, which possible influence the use of informal vocabulary (context, audience, topic of the talk show);
- linguistic ‘portraits’ of the concrete public speakers (Do they always speak (in)formal or are they able to code-switch? When do they that and when not?);
- the main goal of the use of informal vocabulary (to entertain, to influence, to manipulate,...);
- the colloquial vocabulary as a part of the ‘new’ standard Lithuanian.
From Iceland...
Ari Páll Kristinsson (University of Iceland) writes: I want to let you know that me and my colleague Amanda Hilmarsson-Dunn, Univ. of Southampton, are today [May 28, TK’s comment] submitting a research project proposal to the Icelandic Research Fund (Rannis). We call our proposed project "The language of Icelandic broadcast mass media, and standard language ideology".
The "rejection proportion" of proposals to the Icelandic Research Fund has in recent years been about 82% so our hopes are not too high (we will know by January 2011).
"Abstract" of our proposal description:
"Broadcast media can be instrumental in establishing language standards, linguistically and ideologically. Any change in language standards in these media has implications for language standards generally, and the ideologies behind them. Inspired in part by the international research network, “Standard Language Ideology in Contemporary Europe”, the aim of this proposed research is to investigate the following: 1) the status of informal language use in present day Icelandic broadcast media; 2) whether particular features of informal language are more frequent in Icelandic radio news today than 15 years ago; 3) whether the language of the Icelandic broadcast media serves as model texts for language use outside radio and television settings; 4) whether the broadcast media play an active role in the creation and propagation of the ideology of standard Icelandic.
In order to carry out these investigations the researchers will: 1) make use of a variety of respondents to evaluate different registers of broadcast media language; 2) analyse the language register of radio news programs; 3) analyse radio language policy documents.
The project has a descriptive as well as a theoretical aspect. It would contribute to current sociolinguistic theory on the relationship between standard languages and mass media, and it would have an impact on further research (not only in Iceland) in the field of standard language ideologies, language policy and planning studies, and media language research.
From Norway…
Stian Haarstad (Trondheim University) has informed me that he is applying for a post doc project, the title of which is [in my translation, TK] Mediated speech norms. Studies of the interplay between the broadcast mass media and the development of spoken Norwegian. The key words given for the project description is standardisation, de-standardisation, dialect levelling, “vernacularization”, “conversationalization”, media language, mass communication, media influence, imagined communities.
From Denmark…
we will send more information about the 3-year post doc project (which has been mentioned earlier) in the next newsletter when the selection process has been brought to an end.
The first SLICE book
Finally it is a pleasure to inform you that work on our our first SLICE book is proceeding acoording to schedule. Close to all the ‚country reports‘ which will make up part 1 of the book have been received.
September 2010
Dear friends
It was good to meet many of you at SS 18 in Southampton at the beginning of September.
I deliberately postponed the dispatch of the September issue of SLICE News a few days in order to be able to tell you -- I hoped -- that we had got the money we applied for from NOS-HS to start SLICE Nordic. I have not received the evaluation yet, but the decision of the evaluation committee was announced on the NOS-HS website (http://www.nos-hs.org) this morning, and I am sorry to have to inform you that we are not among the 6 applications that were successful (out of a total of 103).
The good news this morning came from Wim:
Ze is er!Britt04 10 2010 • 2,940kg • 48cmWolk van een dochter vanWim en Anouck Vandenbussche-DebroyeCONGRATULATIONS!!
Joyful news from Bergen, too:
The Bergen group has last week collected its data in the county of Rogaland. The matched guise test was carried out in nine classes and two groups of teachers in Stavanger, and two classes and one group of teachers in Ogna, a rural area 65 km south of Stavanger. This autumn expedition took place in the finest weather, and it was a success w.r.t. both data collection and social life. The group has now become well trained in doing this test work, and as normal not one pupil was able to guess what the test was about. Among the teachers there is quite often somebody in the group who has a suspicion that it can be about evaluation of dialects. (These answers are documented in the questionnaires.)
These were the last tests directed by and paid by the project "Processes of dialect change". Now we've collected vast sets of data from three regions and from both urban and rural communities in two of the regions. In all five communities four regional varieties (two rural + two urban) and a Central East Norwegian variety have been guised, and in Bergen and Stavanger we've also used an additional test design of three regional (two urban + one rural) and two varieties of Central East Norwegian.
Now we've got huge piles of questionnaires and quite a lot of work to do for the coming cold winter. Some results from the first tests that we carried out last winter were presented in Southampton this month. Next year we'll be able to tell "the whole truth" about West Norwegian conscious and subconscious attitudes.
October 2010
Dear friends
The news this time is short but good: I have the pleasure to wish Nataša Tolimir-Hölzl (Institut für Slawistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) welcome to our SLICE network. Please find a presentation of her project on language attitudes in Republika Srpska in the attached file.
December 2010
Dear friends
You may remember from last year that your vieux rédacteur has the habit of disappearing on ski in the Norwegian mountains when the days get at their shortest, happily leaving the internet behind in the Danish flatland. Therefore, please receive this Mid December News as a replacement of both the End of November and End of December News.
SLICE vol. 1
2010 was the year when we got a long way in preparing our first SLICE book. The editors (Nik and I) have received 13 country reports over the past half year. We had plans to meet face-to-face about these reports in Copenhagen in the first weekend of December, as Nik and Justine were coming to slicer Janus Mortensen’s PhD defence at Roskilde University Centre. But the heavy snow fall at that time in both UK and DK put an end to those plans. (Nothing and nobody could stop Janus, however, rumours have it that his defence was the best ever. Congratulations on the degree, Janus). Nik and I are working via email instead and hope to be able to send all ‘country reporters’ our comments for X-mas.
FYI, these are the country reports (in alphabetic order; with authors in parentheses):
Austria (Barbara Soukup & Sylvia Moosmüller)Denmark (Frans Gregersen)Finland, Swedish-speaking (Jan-Ola Östman & Leila Mattfolk)Finland, Finnish-speaking (Pirkko Nuolijärvi & Johanna Vaattovaara)Germany (Philipp Stoeckle & Christoph Hare Svenstrup)Iceland (Stephen Pax Leonard & Kristján Árnason)Ireland, Irish-speaking (Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin & Noel Ó Murchadha)Lithuania (Loreta Vaicekauskienė)Netherlands (Stefan Grondelaers & Roeland van Hout)Norway (Helge Sandøy)Sweden (Mats Thelander)UK English-speaking (Peter Garrett, Charlotte Selleck & Nikolas Coupland)UK Welsh-speaking (Elen Robert)The second part of the book will provide theoretical and methodological reflections in a number of chapters authored by (in alphabetic order) Jannis Androutsopoulos, Peter Auer & Helmut Spiekermann, Allan Bell, Stefan Grondelaers, Jane Stuart-Smith, and Wim Vandenboussche. Also Nik and I will somehow mingle in.
The book will have the title Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe; it will be published by Novus Forlag, Oslo, and is scheduled to appear in early autumn 2011.
SLICE vol. 2
The plan is to establish a SLICE series at Novus.
Stef and I have begun preparing Volume 2. Its provisional title is Experimental studies of changing language standards in contemporary Europe. Its general aim is to create a ‘foundational text’ for ongoing and future work within the SLICE experimental strand. As we have taken our departure in SLICE’s thematic panel at SS18 (which we organized together), and other contributions by slicers at SS18, this is not news to all of you.
Like volume 1, volume 2 will be divided into two parts. Part I will consist of papers that address the theoretical and methodological problems posed by experimental SLI research in more general terms, whereas Part II will contain papers that report on a number of various experimental SLI studies that have been accomplished.
For part I we are also inviting some experts from outside the current SLICE group, as we feel sure their contributions can help taking our programme forward.
All slicers who feel they have something to contribute, either for Part I or Part II, are invited to send Stef and me a note about this as soon as possible.
Let this be followed by informal outlines of what you are planning to write by the end of January.
The deadline for sending in draft versions will be July 1.
We aim at getting the book out in 2011.
That’s about all for 2010, then. I look forward to our collaboration in 2011, and strongly hope that we can find ways to meet again soon.
I wish you all a peaceful and relaxing X-mas, and a happy new year.