Changes in the pitch of individual Helsinki and Tampere speakers in the light of real-time corpus with three time points from the 1970s to the 2010s
Keywords:
F0, idiolectal change, speakers' pitchAbstract
Sociolinguistic real-time research in Finland has mainly dealt with phonological and
morphological features. Our study broadens the perspective to include prosodic features
by looking at changes in speaker pitch (F0). The material includes interview recordings of
Helsinki and Tampere speakers from the 1970s, 1990s and 2010s. There are a total of 21
speakers interviewed three times (10 women, 11 men). Of these, 16 were born in the 1950s
and five in the 1920s and 1930s. Interviews with 14 twice-recorded female speakers are used
as supplemental reference material.
Lowering of the pitch of women speakers has long been reported in international studies.
On the other hand, recent studies have shown that such a downward trend in pitch has not
been observed in Finland in recent decades. Our study investigated what changes in pitch
have taken place by looking at interview recordings of the same female and male speakers
from two cities over a period of four decades.
The study revealed that there is no uniform trend of pitch change related to age or time period
for male speakers. In contrast, for female speakers, pitch decreased between the ages of 20
and 40, regardless of the time periods associated with these ages. These changes are primarily
due to expansion of the individual’s pitch range towards lower frequencies. This trend would
appear to be socially rather than biologically based.
