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.

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