Edited by Nicole Baumgarten and Roel Vismans
[Topics in Address Research 5] 2023
► pp. 13–34
This chapter compares address practices in “Got Talent” TV programmes, in which contestants present their talents in front of a jury. We aim to show how the judges address contestants and how these practices differ in episodes of Finnish and Hungarian “Got Talent”. Our study shows that T forms are favoured in both languages. Overall, the repertoire of addressing is wider in the Hungarian dataset, in which both T/V opposition and nominal forms are used to express increasing familiarity between participants. On Finnish “Got Talent”, variation only emerges in the frequency of personal pronouns and first names, used to make successful contestants visible. Although television is a special context, address practices on the “Got Talent” shows can reflect ongoing changes more generally in address practices vis-à-vis informality.