Compliance-gaining as a function of accent: public requests in varieties of Danish

Abstract

This paper is concerned with exploring the relationship between cooperative behaviour and public requests voiced in different Danish accents. Following a method devised by Bourhis and Giles (1976), audiences in a Danish provincial town's five-screen cinema were asked, over the loudspeaker system, to assist in the planning of future film programmes by completing a questionnaire. This procedure was conducted on four successive nights, each night using a new guise, all of which represented possible norms in the local speech community (viz., Standard Danish, mild and broad Zealand, and Copenhagen varieties). The five audiences were characterized on a series of background variables, making it possible ultimately to demonstrate how different social groups display different levels of cooperation as a function of the guised requests. Although compliance-gaining was overall most effective when the request was voiced in Standard Danish, intriguing large-scale differences between audiences emerged. Implications of these findings for applied settings are given, as are their relevance for studies in language attitudes in general.