Negotiating Identities, Ideas and Transforming Places: Perceptions and Narratives of Dialect in Rural-Urban Encounters, 1870-1945

PhD project by Ida Bzorek, junior investigator.

Ida Bzorek’s project explores how ordinary people in Denmark experienced and narrated encounters with dialect during the country’s first major rural–urban transitions, between 1870 and 1945. In this period of extensive urbanization, new linguistic norms confronted local dialects, shaping people’s identities, sense of belonging, and not least their interpersonal relationships. These encounters between language and social change make up the starting point for her work at TRANSITION.

It has always fascinated me to understand how ideas and stories from the past not only reflect the world they emerged in, but also actively shaped it. Language was never just a neutral tool; it carries ideologies and ideas that reveal how people make sense of themselves and others

By studying how people narrated their experiences with dialect, she seeks to uncover how language ideologies influenced cultural and social identities in a time when both rural and urban lives were undergoing profound change.

In her research, Ida asks how the concept of dialect was perceived and narratively employed in personal accounts of rural–urban encounters, and how such perceptions evolved across decades of transformation. By combining historical perspectives with sociolinguistic approaches, she positions the project within perceptual dialectology and sociodialectology, while also contributing to the field of historical sociolinguistics. This interdisciplinary orientation allows her to highlight both the individual and the collective dimensions of language in transition.

The project is grounded in three strands of source material central to TRANSITION: personal memoirs and autobiographies collected by the National Museum, demographic data from the Link-Lives project, and literary depictions of rural–urban life from the period Ida is studying. Ida uses personal memoirs and autobiographies to explore how individuals described their own encounters with dialect. She connects these accounts with demographic data from Link-Lives, tying life histories to people’s personal memoirs. Finally, she incorporates perspectives from literature to understand how rural–urban encounters and the voices of dialect found new forms of expression. Together, these sources make it possible to link individual experiences with broader narratives of change, tracing how perceptions of dialect moved across time and space. They also allow Ida to combine close, qualitative readings of personal voices with wider, diachronic perspectives that reveal how language ideologies took shape and shifted during Denmark’s rural–urban transitions.