RAMUNĖ ČIČIRKAITĖ

Institute of the Lithuanian Language

TENDENCIES IN THE LENGTHENING OF STRESSED SHORT VOWELS IN NEWS BROADCASTS, 1960–2011

KEYWORDS: news broadcasts, standard language, vowel lengthening.

1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

The claim that the language used by the media directly affects our speech—as television viewers and radio listeners—may be just one of many language myths (Chambers 1998); nevertheless, media language can influence our language attitudes, and changing attitudes can promote changes in linguistic behavior, in the selection of linguistic codes, and in the language itself, whether isolated or systemic (cf. Trudgill 1986; Milroy, Milroy 1999; Kerswill 2003, etc.).

Recently, researchers in many European countries have been seeking links between the role of the media and processes taking place in society, such as the destandardization of the standard language (SL) or the formation of new centers of SL (Kristiansen, Coupland 2011). It has been suggested that in some countries large cities are becoming new centers for the formation of SL norms, and for some time now attempts have therefore been made to link media-language norms with urban language norms (Thoegersen, Kristiansen, Östman 2012; cf. also Coupland 2012). It is thought that such changes in media language may become more pronounced alongside societal changes, as the boundaries between private and public speech begin to disappear and informal communication becomes increasingly prevalent in all areas of public life. Lithuanian researchers are only now beginning to study more intensively whether these processes are occurring in our country (see Tamaševičius 2012). Language planners have for some time drawn attention to a phenomenon observed in spoken media that disrupts the system of Lithuanian standard pronunciation: in both unstressed and stressed syllables, the quantitative opposition between short and long vowels is diminishing; in other words, there is a tendency to shorten long vowels and lengthen short ones (Pupkis 1999,

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2007; Kači už?

TABLE 1. Distribution of news programs and their participants across different stages of media development

Stage of media development

Duration of news programs

Number of news program participants

Soviet period (1960–1987)

334 min.

47 (36 men and 11 women)

Transition period (1988–1992)

138 min.

25 (15 men and 10 women)

Current period (1993–2011)

158 min.

50 (25 men and 25 women)

The study does not take into account the speaker’s age or dialect or place of origin, since in many cases (especially for radio program journalists) personal details are not known and cannot be established. In addition, it is assumed that these factors should not, in principle, affect the speech of professional journalists, who should adhere to standard language norms.

To examine how widespread the lengthening of stressed short vowels was at different stages of media development, the relative frequency of lengthened vowels is calculated for each speaker. This measure is used to calculate the overall relative frequency of lengthened vowels among men and women or in individual periods.

The research sample consists of 5,994 words from, as mentioned, 37 news programs and excerpts from them. The sample includes:

1) disyllabic (a) and polysyllabic (b) Lithuanian words in which the syllable nucleus is a stressed short vowel a, e, i, or u, e.g.: a) būtais, didì, džiūgià, mès­ti, metù, ràšti; b) àtnesa, devynì, krìsdavo, netrùkus, pabaigojè, pranėšime, šilùminę, ùžvirė;

2) non-Lithuanian words in which a Lithuanian ending—suffix or inflection—is stressed, e.g.: centrinio, eksponatùs, fonė, programà, respublikinis, rezultatù, specialybė³.

Uninflected non-Lithuanian words (e.g.: interviu, taksi, žiuri, etc.) were not included in the study sample because lengthening of stressed short vowels in them may be determined by factors other than those applying to Lithuanian words, primarily the foreign origin of the word itself. In addition, only words used in news broadcasts and their segments that lacked explicitly ex-

³ When presenting the examples, the words' authentic stress patterns are retained.

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pressed dialogicality and spontaneity were included in the sample. The use of stressed short vowels was not studied in dialogic and/or spontaneous speech segments, since such segments and the prepared monologic speech typical of news broadcasts are different speech situations, which may give rise to different linguistic behavior.

To determine whether a short vowel in a stressed position remains short or is lengthened (to a half-long or long sound), an auditory, or listening-based, method is used. The principal feature distinguishing short and lengthened vowels is vowel quantity (duration); an additional feature is its quality (tenseness). Since for this study it is essentially irrelevant whether a stressed short vowel is lengthened to a half-long or long sound⁴, two vowel groups are distinguished for analysis—short vowels retained as such and lengthened vowels. The relationship between these groups (the relative frequency of lengthened vowels, expressed as a percentage) is calculated in this study to identify changes in the lengthening phenomenon across different stages in the development of the media.

3. RESEARCH RESULTS

The study found that in news broadcasts produced during all three stages of media development (the Soviet period, the transitional period, and the present-day period), a stressed position may contain variants of different quantities in place of a short vowel: a short (a) or lengthened (half-long (b) or long (c)) vowel. As far as can be determined auditorily, short, half-long, and long vowels occur in word stems (a1, b1, c1). No instances were found in the study material of a long vowel being used instead of a short one at the stressed end of a word in news broadcasts: in this position, unlike in the word stem, only short and half-long vowels occurred (a2, b2) (in the example, all variants of the short vowel are shown in italics), cf.:

a1. was, another, helps, uninvited,

b1. did not give, carries, abroad, everything,

c1. workshop, better, presentation, own,

a2. day, together, to carry, first,

b2. electric., there is no., sincere., all..

⁴ Only the fact of vowel lengthening itself is important, so no additional duration measurements to distinguish a half-long vowel from a long one were taken.

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FIG. 1. Relative frequency (percentages) of lengthened vowels at different stages in the development of the media

Speakers who more often use a lengthened rather than a short vowel in a stressed position are found at all stages of media development, but the tendency to lengthen stressed short vowels was observed more frequently in news broadcasts produced during the Soviet era. In addition, since 2000, more journalists have emerged in whose speech no instances of lengthening are recorded at all. Thus, instances of lengthening stressed short vowels in news broadcasts have gradually decreased: during the Soviet era, speakers tended to lengthen every third short vowel, during the transitional period every fifth, and in the present period every seventh short vowel in a stressed syllable (see Fig. 1).

As can be seen, lengthened vowels used in stressed positions in the speech of news broadcasts are twice as rare in the present period as during the Soviet era. Moreover, as far as auditory analysis of short vowels used in stressed positions allows us to determine, during the Soviet era there was a greater tendency to use a long vowel instead of a short one (a), whereas in the present period a half-long sound was preferred (b), e.g.:

a. dvasininkíjos, lietūviais, pranešīmų (correspondent in the radio report “Plenary Session of the Committee for Cultural Relations,” 1966)

elektrėniškių, išrenkamas, partinio, pranešimo, respublikos (correspondent in the radio report “Celebrations Marking the Centenary of Vladimir Lenin’s Birth,” 1970)

alūs, nedidelės, respublikos, savo, turi (correspondent for the LTV programme “Panorama,” 1977)

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FIG. 2. Relative frequency (percentages) of lengthened vowels at different stages in the development of the media in the speech of men and women

b. įtì.kinamo, pridėti.nės, ũ.žsienio (news presenter for Baltic Television, 1994)

bũ.vo, dvì.dešimt, istoriškũ.mo, nũ.tarė, pagrindì.niai, visuomenì.nė (correspondent for the LTV programme “Labas rytas,” 1999)

pritarì.mo, tarptautì.nio (LNK žinių korespondentė, 2011)

Men and women use lengthened vowels in stressed positions in a similar way: they most often pronounced lengthened vowels instead of short ones in stressed positions during the Soviet era and least often in the present period (see Fig. 2). It is quite difficult to give an unequivocal answer to the question of why lengthened vowels are becoming less common in news broadcasts. This pronunciation change may be due to the longstanding efforts of language standardizers: in our language-planning tradition, the tendency to lengthen stressed short vowels has been viewed negatively since the first radio broadcasts (cf. Talmantas 1933: 6), and later, since the first television broadcasts (cf. Vaitkevičiūtė 1965: 59). Moreover, this lengthening phenomenon has been socially stigmatized for decades (for more on this, see Čičirkaitė, Vaicekauskienė 2012).

Interestingly, classical sociolinguistic interviews conducted with second- and third-generation Lithuanians in Vilnius revealed similar tendencies to lengthen stressed short vowels (Čičirkaitė, Vaicekauskienė 2012): Vilnius residents who focused most closely on speech—that is, while reading minimal pairs differing in one feature—lengthened every seventh stressed syllable, just like announcers, correspondents, or news presenters reading prepared texts for news broadcasts, sometimes even texts marked for stress. Whether the relative frequency figures for lengthened vowels in news broadcasts and among Vilnius residents

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FIG. 3. Relative frequency (percentages) of lengthened vowels i, u, a, e across different stages in the development of the media

It is too early to say whether the examples in minimal pairs indicate that media pronunciation is drawing closer to the standard language, or perhaps that a new center of media norms is taking shape on the basis of Vilnius pronunciation: Lithuanian linguistics still lacks comprehensive comparative studies of Vilnius and media speech.

Across all three stages of media development examined, lengthened vowels occur in the same descending order of frequency: i, u, a, e. This means that in the Soviet, transitional, and current periods alike, the vowel most often lengthened under stress in news broadcasts is i (e.g., ki_.tas⁵, visi_., dvi_{.-dešimties, liki.mas, vi.siškai, ąžuoli.nis, asmeni.nis, hitleri.nis}); somewhat less often, u (institū.tas, grū.pė, lietū.viai, tū.rite, svarbū., respū.blika, sutriu.škino, bū.deliai); still less often, a (sá.vo, pá.neša, maná.sis, pirmá.sis, á.tvežė); and least often, e (didé.snė, tebė.kvepiančioje, suve.stumėt). In other words, high vowels i and u are lengthened under stress more often, while lengthened variants of the low vowels a and e are considerably less frequent⁶. Comparing how the distribution of each vowel lengthened under stress changed across the different stages of media development, we would see that cases of lengthening the short low vowels a and e used in stressed position in spoken me-

⁵ Here and in the examples that follow, the half-length mark is used conventionally: it indicates not a half-long vowel, but a vowel lengthened under stress to half-long or long.

⁶ The tendency to lengthen high vowels i, u more often than low vowels a, e is also observable in the speech of second- and third-generation Vilnius residents (Čičirkaitė, Vaicekauskienė 2012).

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The frequency of lengthening these vowels in the media is declining: in the current period, vowel a is lengthened under stress three times less often, and vowel e five to six times less often than in the Soviet years. However, the relative frequency of lengthened variants of the vowel most often lengthened under stress, i, changes only slightly: in the Soviet, transitional, and current periods alike, the lengthened variant, rather than the short one, accounts for about three-fifths of all instances of vowel i in stressed position. Vowel u is retained as short in stressed position less and less often: the relative frequency of lengthened u rises gradually across all three periods: in the Soviet period the lengthened variant accounts for 27 percent, whereas in the current period it accounts for almost 37 percent⁷ (see Fig. 3).

The distribution of stressed lengthened vowels i, u, a, e in men’s and women’s speech reveals both similarities and differences (see Table 2).

TABLE 2. Relative frequency (percentages) of lengthened vowels i, u, a, e across different stages of media development in men’s and women’s speech

Vowels | Men | Women | 1960–1987 | 1988–1992 | 1993–2011 | 1960–1987 | 1988–1992 | 1993–2011 | [i.] | 60.5 | 61 | 51.2 | 50 | 62.5 | 64.1 | [u.] | 26.5 | 31.2 | 44.4 | 37.5 | 31.8 | 32.1 | [a.] | 10.5 | 6.9 | 3.8 | 6.25 | 5.7 | 3.4 | [e.] | 2.5 | 0.9 | 0.6 | 6.25 | 0 | 0.4

Lengthening under stress of the short low vowels a, e is becoming less frequent in the speech of male and female news journalists. However, at first glance, the relative frequency of lengthened high vowels i, u in stressed position appears to be changing in opposite directions in men’s and women’s speech. Men’s speech shows fewer instances of lengthening vowel i, but the lengthened variant of vowel u is used more often in stressed position in place of the short vowel. In women’s speech, compared with the Soviet years, cases of lengthening vowel i increased by 14 percent in the current period, but it is used a few percentage points less often—

⁷ Of course, it would be interesting to examine how prevalent the lengthening of stressed short vowels a, e, i, u is in word stems and endings, but apart from these two positions, there are too few instances of the vowels used in them in each speaker’s speech to draw general conclusions through comparison.

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FIG. 4. Relative frequency (in percentages) of lengthened vowels in word stems and word endings at different stages in the development of the media

lengthened vowel u variants. A study of Vilnius residents showed that gender can be a significant factor in the frequency of lengthened speech variants: men from Vilnius are more than twice as likely as women to lengthen stressed short vowels, both in word stems and at word endings (Čičirkaitė, Vaicekauskienė 2012). Nevertheless, the variations in journalists’ pronunciation observed in this study are too small to claim that gender also determines variation in the speech of public speakers. Rather, the opposite is true: they confirm the assumption that public speech is more homogeneous and less socially differentiated.

In news programmes broadcast at different stages in the development of the media, stressed short vowels lengthened in word stems and at word endings are also distributed unevenly: during the Soviet years, one in every five short vowels in a stressed stem syllable was lengthened, compared with one in every seventeen at word endings. In the current period, lengthened stressed vowels are used less often: one in every eight short vowels is lengthened in stems, and only one in every fifty at word endings. Thus, instances of lengthening stressed short vowels at word endings have always been considerably less frequent than in stems⁸, but their number is even lower in the current period (see Fig. 4).

Lithuanian linguistics generally holds that the lengthening of short vowels in word stems is of dialectal origin, whereas lengthening these vowels at word endings is regarded as urban slang or street speech, arising from the influence of other languages or following their example (Grumadienė 1983: 87; Pupkis 2006, 2007;

⁸ Second- and third-generation Vilnius residents included in the study are also much less inclined to lengthen stressed short vowels at word endings than in stems (five times less often) (Čičirkaitė, Vaicekauskienė 2012).

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Vitkauskas 1973: 48; 1978: 24; Zinkevičius 1966: 104). Jei (kaip matyti iš 4 pav.) informacinėse laidose ir žodžio kamiene, ir galūnėje vartojamų kirčiuotų pailgintųjų balsių mažėja, galbūt mažėja ir tarmių bei miesto kalbos poveikis viešajai kalbai.

4. CONCLUDING REMARKS

An analysis of the lengthening of stressed short vowels over the past five decades showed that in media speech, lengthened vowels are used instead of short ones quite rarely. There is a greater tendency to lengthen stressed vowels in stems, while lengthening at word endings is extremely rare. This applies to all three stages in the development of the media.

In the media speech representing the current period, fewer lengthened vowels are recorded than in the Soviet or transitional periods. A similar relative frequency of lengthened vowels is also observed in the speech of present-day Vilnius residents.

Analysis of individual vowels suggests that changes in public speech are driven primarily by shifts in the pronunciation of the two vowels a and e. The number of instances of lengthening the stressed short vowel i remains constant, while instances of lengthening the vowel u are even becoming more frequent. Thus, specific phonetic variables influence changes in pronunciation. Vowel lengthening does not depend on the gender of the speakers studied—in this respect, public-speech professionals differ from ordinary speakers.

The decline in lengthening in media speech may be due to the ideology of prescriptivism, which has a clear linguistic strategy and has adhered to the same direction of codification from the very first radio and television programmes. In addition, it may be assumed that changes in media speech are also driven by the natural evolution of broadcast speech, as the number of speakers who lengthen stressed short vowels declines on radio and television.

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Gauta 2012 12 27

PHENOMENON OF STRESSED SHORT VOWEL LENGTHENING IN NEWS BROADCASTS FROM 1960 TO 2011

Summary

The paper presents a retrospective auditive analysis of the speech of TV and radio news. The aim of the study is to find out how frequent the lengthening of stressed short vowels is in the speech of professional voices such as journalists, news readers and hosts and how this phenomenon changes. The analysis covers more than 10 hours of news broadcasts since year 1960. The investigation has resulted in identifying the following tendencies of TV and radio news: 1) in the speech of professional voices the lengthening of stressed short vowels decreases over time; 2) the lengthening commonly affects word stems but it seems to be quite rare at the end of the words; 3) the lengthening of stressed short vowels doesn’t depend on gender of a speaker.

KEYWORDS: broadcasts, standard language, vowel lengthening.

RAMUNĖ ČIČIRKAITĖ

Lietuvių kalbos institutas

P. Vileišio g. 5, LT-10308 Vilnius

[email protected]

[email protected]

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