It has been suggested that Danish is a language particularly prone to spoken language
reductions in spontaneous speech. Previous studies have shown that reduction
phenomena, in Danish and other languages, are rule-governed by e.g. phonological
context, word frequency and stress patterns. This paper analyses two reduction
phenomena, those occurring in the endings -ede and
-te in a genre of spoken Danish which is particularly resistant to
reductions, viz. radio news readings. Its first aim is to establish the reduction
rules of formal spoken Danish and compare these with the rules of more informal
spoken Danish, e.g. sociolinguistic interviews. Reduction of -te is
found to follow the same general rules as in spontaneous speech, although reductions
are far less frequent in news readings. Reduction of -ede is found
to follow rules different from those of spontaneous speech. The second aim is to
investigate whether the reduction rules have changed over the 70 years which the data
span. It is found that the rules, and thus the style, have indeed changed. The modern
rules appear to be simpler and include less complex interaction effects.