Every language has accents, and they just might reveal more about you than you think.
Who knew that saying “sluffing school” instead of “ditching school” could label you as a Utah native? Thousands of online language tests use region-specific dialect markers, such as “sluff,” to locate your hometown—or scarily close to it.
In Danish, a similar phenomenon exists, where some speakers pronounce [b] at the end of words as a [w]. Having researched this variation, Professor Earl Brown (Language Variation) and recent graduate Eric Christensen (Linguistics ’24) studied the usage patterns and perceptions associated with both [b] and [w] pronunciations. Though their findings didn’t link this usage to a particular city in Denmark, they found that the [w] pronunciation seems to be associated with age, perceived level of education, and even certain regions in the country.
Studies of Variation
Brown first picked up on the subtle [b] to [w] pronunciation change in research papers that described the trend’s occurrence in words such as købe (ku-beh), which becomes køwe (ku-weh). He then contacted Christensen, who learned Danish as a second language, and together they created a two-part study: In the first part, they studied the two pronunciations using a corpus of Danish speech; in the second, they distributed surveys to determine the perceived sociolinguistic associations accompanying each pronunciation.
To start off the study, Christensen and undergrad Naomi Hall (Environmental Science ’24), a native Danish speaker, listened to interviews on LANCHART, a corpus created by the University of Copenhagen. They then made note of any time a [b] or [w] sound was heard and looked for patterns in the speakers’ background. From the corpus data, Brown observes that “younger speakers of Danish are doing the [w] more than older speakers.” He continues, “That brought up the question: Do native Danes perceive that to be a younger thing to do?”
To answer this question, Brown and Christensen created a survey where native Danish speaking participants listened to 30 different sentences—some of which used the [b] pronunciation, some the [w], and others an unrelated distractor variation. Respondents were then asked to guess the speaker’s education level and age as well as rank their professionalism and preciseness of language.
The survey findings proved very different from the data gathered from LANCHART: “With the survey, people didn’t perceive there to be a pronunciation difference according to age,” Brown explains. They did find, however, “that the [w] is a sociolinguistic marker of slightly less educational training and is perceived to be less professional sounding, less precise in speech, and more rural than urban.”
Welcoming Variation in Any Form
Using the survey feedback, Brown and Christensen found a pattern in the perceived usage of both forms: The [w] form is seen as more common in rural areas (such as Vestjysk), and the [b] form is often associated with cities (such as Ømål). This distinction likely led to the survey results, which showed the [w] variation more closely associated with less education. “It’s alright that language varies within one dialect and that varieties of language are different within one language,” Brown explains. “That’s good, and it shouldn’t be looked down upon.”
Brown believes that recognizing this variation as a sociolinguistic marker helps show how one’s dialect and identity interact. Brown concludes, “When people use language, they’re using it to project identity just as much as they are to communicate a message to someone else.”
Learn more about Brown’s research here.