IDEALIOSIOS BENDRINĖS TARTIES BEIEŠKANT: ILGOJO-ĮTEMPTOJO BALSIO O VARTOSENA 1960–2011 M. INFORMACINĖSE LAIDOSE
IN SEARCH OF AN IDEAL STANDARD PRONUNCIATION: USAGE OF THE LONG TENSE VOWEL O IN NEWS BROADCASTS FROM 1960 TO 2011

Summary/Abstract: The paper raises the issues of how the long tense vowel o, which is considered as one of the markers of standard language, has been realized in TV and radio news broadcasts over the last five decades and what linguistic and non-linguistic factors affect changes in its usage. The empirical data of this study consist of TV and radio news broadcasts since 1960. All the news broadcasts come from a representative, retrospective corpus of more than 60 hours of Lithuanian broadcast media divided into three periods of broadcast media development: the Soviet period (from 1960 to 1987), a transitional one (from 1988 to 1992), and the contemporary period (from 1993 to 2011). The pronunciation of a total of 39 news broadcasts and their fragments and of a total of 134 anchors, announcers, news readers, and reporters was analyzed. The study revealed that although our language standardization ideology has not changed since the seventh decade of the last century, even in the “ideal” conditions of the Soviet era, i.e., when the content and the speech of news broadcasts were strictly supervised and controlled and all the texts were rehearsed and read, the usage of the long tense vowel o had never met the ideal of the standard language pronunciation.

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