Language Change In Real And Apparent Time

This book makes the case for the value of a combined panel and trend study approach in studying real- and apparent-time language change to reconcile conspicuous disparities between the individual and the community. Through an examination of the Swabian dialect in southwestern Germany in two speech communities over four decades, this volume resolves critical methodological challenges in investigating lifespan and community change. This work affirms the importance of the speech community in shaping change and demonstrating how speakers’ notions of local identity and community belonging inform their choice of linguistic variants. Drawing on a comprehensive, integrated methodology, this research brings together diverse approaches for measuring changing social constructs and analyzing linguistic structures using state-of-the-art statistical methods bolstered by participant-observer and ethnographic observations. Beaman explores indexicalities of identity, accommodation, and geographic mobility to investigate how predictable sociolinguistic patterns promote variation and influence language change. Empirically, this volume documents processes of dialect leveling and supraregionalization and the emergence of a “Swabian Renaissance” among younger, well-educated urban speakers who leverage the social indexical status of certain linguistic variables to convey social meanings of local prestige and community belonging. Methodologically, this book offers best practices from a combined panel and trend study, demonstrating the compatibility and complementarity of real- and apparent-time analyses in uncovering the nature, rate, and dispersion of linguistic change. Theoretically, this work links intraspeaker lifespan change and interspeaker community change into a holistic approach, pushing forward our understanding of the role that “orderly heterogeneity” plays in language variation and change. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, dialectology, and historical linguistics.

In Corpus Linguistics and Sociolinguistics, Beke Hansen provides an in-depth analysis of variation and change in the expression of modality in second-language varieties of English by adopting an integrated sociolinguistic and corpus-based approach.

"This book makes the case for the value of a combined panel and trend study approach in studying real- and apparent-time language change to reconcile conspicuous disparities between the individual and the community. Through an examination of the Swabian dialect in southwestern Germany in two speech communities over four decades, this volume resolves critical methodological challenges in investigating lifespan and community change. This work affirms the importance of the speech community in shaping change and demonstrating how speakers' notions of local identity and community belonging inform their choice of linguistic variants. Drawing on a comprehensive, integrated methodology, this research brings together diverse approaches for measuring changing social constructs and analyzing linguistic structures using state-of-the-art statistical methods bolstered by participant-observer and ethnographic observations. Beaman explores indexicalities of identity, accommodation, and geographic mobility to investigate how predictable sociolinguistic patterns promote variation and influence language change. Empirically, this volume documents processes of dialect leveling and supraregionalization and the emergence of a "Swabian Renaissance" among younger, well-educated urban speakers who leverage the social indexical status of certain linguistic variables to convey social meanings of local prestige and community belonging. Methodologically, this book offers best practices from a combined panel and trend study, demonstrating the compatibility and complementarity of real- and apparent-time analyses in uncovering the nature, rate, and dispersion of linguistic change. Theoretically, this work links intraspeaker lifespan change and interspeaker community change into a holistic approach, pushing forward our understanding of the role that "orderly heterogeneity" plays in language variation and change. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, dialectology, and historical linguistics"--

Reflecting a multitude of developments in the study of language change and variation over the last ten years, this extensively updated second edition features a number of new chapters and remains the authoritative reference volume on a core research area in linguistics. A fully revised and expanded edition of this acclaimed reference work, which has established its reputation based on its unrivalled scope and depth of analysis in this interdisciplinary field Includes seven new chapters, while the remainder have undergone thorough revision and updating to incorporate the latest research and reflect numerous developments in the field Accessibly structured by theme, covering topics including data collection and evaluation, linguistic structure, language and time, language contact, language domains, and social differentiation Brings together an experienced, international editorial and contributor team to provides an unrivalled learning, teaching and reference tool for researchers and students in sociolinguistics

This volume brings together research on panel studies with the aim of providing a coherent empirical and theoretical knowledge-base for examining the impact of maturation and lifespan-specific effects on linguistic malleability in the post-adolescent speaker. Building on the work of Wagner and Buchstaller (2018), the present collection offers a critical examination of the theoretical implications of panel research across a range of geographic regions and time periods. The volume seeks to offer a way forward in the debates circling about the phenomenon of later-life language change, drawing on contributions from a variety of linguistic disciplines to examine critical topics such as the effect of linguistic architecture, the roles of mobility and identity construction, and the impact of frequency effects. Taken together, this edited collection both informs and pushes forward key questions on the nature of lifespan change, making this key reading for students and researchers in cognitive linguistics, historical linguistics, dialectology, and variationist sociolinguistics.

What role has social status played in shaping the English language across the centuries? Have women also been the agents of language standardization in the past? Can apparent-time patterns be used to predict the course of long-term language change? These questions and many others will be addressed in this volume, which combines sociolinguistic methodology and social history to account for diachronic language change in Renaissance English. The approach has been made possible by the new machine-readable Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) specifically compiled for this purpose. The 2.4-million-word corpus covers the period from 1420 to 1680 and contains over 700 writers. The volume introduces the premises of the study, discussing both modern sociolinguistics and English society in the late medieval and early modern periods. A detailed description is given of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, its encoding, and the separate database which records the letter writers' social backgrounds. The pilot studies based on the CEEC suggest that social rank and gender should both be considered in diachronic language change, but that apparent-time patterns may not always be a reliable cue to what will happen in the long run. The volume also argues that historical sociolinguistics offers fascinating perspectives on the study of such new areas as pragmatization and changing politeness cultures across time. This extension of sociolinguistic methodology to the past is a breakthrough in the field of corpus linguistics. It will be of major interest not only to historical linguists but to modern sociolinguists and social historians.

Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England is the seminal text in the field of historical sociolinguistics. Demonstrating the real-world application of sociolinguistic research methodologies, this book examines the social factors which promoted linguistic changes in English, laying the foundation for Modern Standard English. This revised edition of Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg’s ground-breaking work: discusses the grammatical developments that shaped English in the early modern period; presents the sociolinguistic factors affecting linguistic change in Tudor and Stuart English, including gender, social status, and regional variation; showcases the authors’ research into personal letters from the people who were the driving force behind these changes; and demonstrates how historical linguists can make use of social and demographic history to analyse linguistic variation over an extended period of time. With brand new chapters on language change and the individual, and on newly developed sociolinguistic research methods, Historical Sociolinguistics is essential reading for all students and researchers in this area.

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.