Increased use of mediatized English in Denmark: the factors that drive sociolinguistic change

Abstract This article reports on a longitudinal study of (reported) contact with English through various media. Two surveys conducted 1995 and 2022 ( n ≈ 1,700) are compared statistically, and differences are discussed. Special attention is paid to the age and cohort of the respondents in an attempt to tease apart whether habits related to mediatized English is related to age-grading, to generational changes or to sweeping technological changes affecting the entire population. The results show that (reported) contact with English through media has increased for most media types, and that this change is more often than not associated with the cohort of the respondent, i.e. younger generations adopt different media habits than their parents and keep to these habits as they grow older. The picture is not uniform, though: contact with English has (apparently) decreased in some media types. This deviant result is discussed, and so is the consequence of increased and cohort-related consumption of mediatized English for the question of sociolinguistic change.