A phonetic approach to political crisis communication: Prosodic variability in Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s communication about COVID-19

Research into spoken crisis communication rarely concerns its meaningful expression and reception by way of human speech sounds. This paper explores the potential of a phonetic approach to crisis communication in general and political crisis communication in particular. It does so, first, by reporting an original quantitative study of Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s use of prosody, focusing on speech rate and voice pitch, in her speeches to the Danish public during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the study found no systematic relationship between the positive or negative contents of Frederiksen’s speeches and her use of speech rate and voice pitch, the authors go on to examine the limitations of their high-level, quantitative approach. This examination centers on a closer, qualitative analysis of two particular press conferences. At this closer level of analysis, Frederiksen’s use of speech rate and voice pitch is shown to be highly deliberate, variable, and meaningful. Our findings indicate that, from a crisis communication perspective, significant interactions between the contents and the prosody of speech may emerge not at the macroscopic level of whole communications, which is where our quantitative study looked for them, but at the microscopic level of intentional utterances.