Lithuanian language ideals
Retrospective research on the language use in broadcast media
The past few decades have brought many changes to the broadcast media which have also affected the ways language is used in public. A variety of new genres emerged and the proportion of the dialogue, polylogue, entertainment genres, spontaneous talk, and non-professional speakers significantly increased. This has resulted in the increased presence of informal talk in media or, in other words, the colloquialisation of media. In Lithuania, the shift became apparent after the restoration of independence and the establishment of several commercial radio stations and, later, of the first commercial TV station. However, similar shifts have also been apparent in the rest of Europe.
One of the main aims of our project was to investigate how the features of the spoken standard Lithuanian had changed in TV and radio discourse since year 1960. For this reason we have compiled the Corpus of the Lithuanian Broadcast Media which consists of 62 hours of transcribed and annotated TV and radio broadcasts. Read more about the Corpus of Broadcast Media
The Corpus of Broadcast Media allows us to analyse a number of salient sociolinguistic variables, e.g. the forms of address, colloquial lexis, discourse markers, etc. The variation and change of some phonetic variables are also investigated.
Besides the retrospective analysis of the language use in broadcast, the research includes the analysis of the language use in contemporary TV and radio broadcasts. Different broadcast genres are compared against the use of the elements of the standard and the ‘common’ Lithuanian.