Rural versus Urban: Styling social position among rural Danish youth

Research output: Book/ReportPh.D. thesis

Documents

  • Signe Wedel Schøning
This ethnographic project discerns how rural adolescents living in West Jutland, Denmark, carry out their daily lives under globalised conditions. The project shows how the young speakers (re)activate, align with and discard ideological perceptions of rural and urban Denmark. By investigating stylisations of Copenhagen speech, Stylised københavnsk, and of traditional, local dialect forms, Stylised vestjysk, it demonstrates how the adolescents exploit and create social meaning potentials indexed by the two stylised registers in social alignment, and how they reflexively comment on, put on display and take position within larger social structures of unequal power structures through such employment. The adolescents did not explicitly discuss power relations between urban and rural Denmark in their everyday social encounters, but when they employ Stylised vestjysk and Stylised københavnsk, they continuously ascribe low social status to the former and high social status to the latter. Thus, the overall picture is one reproducing urban Denmark as a powerful and prestigious centre, whereas rural Denmark is disempowered.
Original languageEnglish
PublisherDet Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet
Number of pages245
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2017

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