ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the scope of the book is stated, together with the motivation, theoretical preliminaries, design, and methods for data collection. The book aims to deepen our understanding of language change, specifically to investigate how linguistic standardization takes place in peripheral areas of an otherwise highly standardized language community, namely Denmark. The book challenges established conceptions of linguistic standardization and calls for a transversal approach regarding both data and methods. This is important if we wish to gain a full picture of linguistic variation and to understand the ways in which people use and perceive linguistic variation in their everyday lives.
The chapter presents the design and theoretical basis for the study. Theoretically, the chapters all draw on Coupland’s notion of sociolinguistic change, and in this first chapter the concept is introduced. The chapter also includes a short account of research on linguistic standardization and dedialectalization. An overview of the field sites—Southern Jutland, Northern Jutland, and the island of Bornholm—and of the data is also included in this chapter. The methods of linguistic ethnography, variationist analysis, discourse studies, and perception studies are mentioned. The data include various types of sound recordings including interviews, group conversations, and self-recordings carried out by the adolescents. Also, video recordings, field notes, social media data, and responses from language perception studies are included in the data collection.
In conclusion, the chapter emphasizes the enormous potential this type of research has for revealing new and interesting patterns of linguistic variation and change seen in close connection to people’s social lives. Seeing standardization as sociolinguistic change allows for an analytical approach that is not limited to variationism, discourse analysis, or linguistic ethnography but that incorporates all of these as different and combined strands both in the analyses and in the data collection. Sociolinguistic change plays a crucial role for the analyses and is discussed further in the individual chapters.
