Language and social status differences in two urban schools

Thomas Rørbeck Nørreby defends his PhD thesis.

 

In this dissertation, I investigate how social difference and distinctions are enacted and talked into being
among schoolchildren in two contemporary urban schools – a “mainstream” public school at Amager and an “elite” private school at Frederiksberg. From an epistemological anchoring in interactional sociolinguistics, I show how the pupils use language to handle and organize their social worlds and how such organizing involves discursive constructions and ascriptions of various identities and stereotypes.


I illustrate how they through such actions draw on and re-shape cultural formations (Agha 2007) of indexical links (Ochs 1992, Silverstein 2003) between ways of speaking and behaving based on local ideological understandings and perceptions about similarity/difference and social status relations. Finally, I discuss how these practices link up with ongoing processes of social stratification in the contemporary Danish society.

 

Assessment Committee

  • Associate Professor Janus Spindler Møller, chair (University of Copenhagen)
  • Docent Line Møller Daugaard (Via University College)
  • Senior Lecturer Miguel Pérez Milans (University College London)

Moderator of the defence

  • TBA

Copies of the thesis will be available for consultation at the following three places:

  • At the Information Desk of the Library of the Faculty of Humanities
  • In Reading Room East of the Royal Library (the Black Diamond)
  • At the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Emil Holms Kanal 2, 2300 Copenhagen S.