Variability in the stress group pattern of Copenhagen Danish with a focus on the Copenhagen multiethnolect

This paper presents an acoustic analysis of the variability in stress group patterns, i.e. the fundamental frequency contour associated with stressed and following unstressed syllables, in Copenhagen Danish with a particular focus on the register known as the Copenhagen multiethnolect. This is a register of Danish spoken by multilingual adolescents. It is prosodically distinct from the register used by monolingual peers. Previous work has shown a difference in vowel durations between the two registers with a near-neutralisation of the vowel length contrast in the multiethnolect. Recordings with 4 speakers from a larger corpus of map tasks containing trisyllabic words with initial stress as place names have been analyzed. All speakers show an expected rise in pitch from the stressed to the first posttonic syllable, but the rise is significantly less steep for speakers of the multiethnolect, which may contribute to the impression of a more syllable-timed rhythm.