Research projects

Ongoing projects

The change in attitudes towards neighbouring countries

Erik Vedder's MA project

This project investigated the hypothesis that attitudes towards a linguistic variety and intelligibility of that variety are linked. This was done by eliciting language attitudes and word recognition scores in 154 Danish and Swedish school children between 7 and 16 years. Language attitudes towards the neighbouring language were elicited by means of a matched-guise experiment while word recognition was tested by auditorily presenting the children to 50 spoken items in their neighbouring language (Danish for Swedish children and vice versa) in a picture-pointing task. Results revealed that while Danish children held more positive attitudes towards Swedish than vice versa and their word recognition scores generally are higher than those of their Swedish peers, the correlation between these two variables is very low, indicating that other factors need to be taken into account in order to explain the well-established asymmetry in mutual intelligibility between spoken Danish and Swedish.