Vinderup in real time

This article is based on a panel and a trend study showing the real-time language changes in spoken Danish over 28 years. The local dialect rapidly loses ground to regional standard Danish, but with large differences between the intra- and the intergenerational changes and with increasing gender differences. Our findings point to women being in the lead of these language changes. To obtain a deeper insight into the linguistic changes we provide a qualitative family study of three generations which relates the use of dialect to the issues of gender, lifestyle and life history. In generation 1 and 2 gender has less bearing on linguistic usage than lifestyle and life history in signalling local affi liation, whereas dialect in generation 3 functions as a masculine subcultural identity marker. Dialect therefore no longer indicates local orientation or a locally bound lifestyle.