Cover not available
Part of
Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII: Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), Leeuwarden, June 2019
Edited by Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen
[Studies in Language Variation 25] 2021
► pp. 269–290

Chapter 12
Leaders of language change

Macro and micro perspectives

ORCID logo | University of Pennsylvania

Questions about who leads language change have been central to the sociolinguistic literature for decades. More recent work on covariation between simultaneous changes calls into question whether broad, generalized change leadership can exist. Using data from Philadelphia, I show that covariation patterns fluctuate over time. These fluctuations are not random but rather appear to be tied to the overall diachronic shifts in the community. However, I also suggest that predicting individual differences in covarying changes is not as simple as operationalizing the traits that have been captured in qualitative descriptions of particular leaders. I propose that reconciling these results requires distinguishing between individual leadership in Labov’s “saccadic” sense and the broader structure of how innovations covary within the community as a whole.

Keywords: sound change, English, covariation, coherence, individual differences, leaders
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Philadelphia vowel changes
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Are covariation patterns stable over time?
    • 4.1Statistical methods
    • 4.2Results
  • 5.Can we predict individual differences within the changes that covary?
    • 5.1The individual differences measures
    • 5.2Statistical methods
    • 5.3Results
  • 6.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.25.12tam
References
Baron-Cohen, Simon, Sally Wheelwright, Richard Skinner, Joanne Martin & Emma Clubley
2001 The Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ): Evidence from Asperger Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism, males, females, scientists and mathematicians. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 31. 5–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Martin Mächler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker
2015 Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). 1–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Becker, Kara
2016 Linking community coherence, individual coherence, and bricolage: The co-occurrence of (R), raised BOUGHT and raised BAD in New York City English. Lingua 172–173. 87–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brysbaert, Marc & Boris New
2009 Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavioral Research Methods 41(4). 977–90. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Denis, Derek
2011 Innovators and innovation: Tracking the innovators of ‘and stuff’ in York English. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 39 17(2).Google Scholar
Dodsworth, Robin
2014 Network embeddedness and the retreat from Southern vowels in Raleigh. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 20(2). 41–50.Google Scholar
Dodsworth, Robin & Mary Kohn
2012 Urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone. Language Variation and Change 24. 221–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Drager, Katie & Jennifer Hay
2012 Exploiting random intercepts: Two case studies in sociophonetics. Language Variation and Change 24. 59–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Feehand, Dennis M. & Matthew J. Salganik
2014 The Networkreporting Package. [URL]
Fruehwald, Josef
2013 The phonological influence on phonetic change. University of Pennsylvania: Ph.D. thesis.Google Scholar
2019 Is phonetic target uniformity phonologically, or sociolinguistically grounded? In Marija Tabain, Paul Warren, Sasha Calhoun & Paola Escudero (eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019, 681–85. Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science Technology Association Inc.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Lewis R.
1992 The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Personality Assessment 4(1). 26–42.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R.
2013 The cognitive coherence of sociolects: How do speakers handle multiple sociolinguistic variables? Journal of Pragmatics 52. 63–71. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. & Frans Hinskens
2016 Linguistic coherence: Systems, repertoires and speech communities. Lingua 172–173. 1–9. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haeri, Niloofar
1991 Sociolinguistic variation in Cairene Arabic: Palatalization and the ‘Qaf’ in the speech of men and women. University of Pennsylvania: Ph.D. thesis.Google Scholar
John, Oliver P. & Sanjay Srivastava
1999 The Big-Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. In Lawrence A. Pervin & Oliver P. John (eds.), Theory and Research (Handbook of Personality 2), 102–38. New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Kassambara, Alboukadel & Fabian Mundt
2017 Factoextra: Extract and visualize the results of multivariate data analyses. [URL]
Kingston, John, Stephanie Rich, Alice Shen & Shifra Sered
2015 Is perception personal? In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences, paper 887. Glasgow: The University of Glasgow.Google Scholar
Labov, William
2001 Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 2. Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William & Ingrid Rosenfelder
2011 The Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus of LING 560 Studies, 1972–2010.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Ingrid Rosenfelder & Josef Fruehwald
2013 One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: Linear incrementation, reversal, and reanalysis. Language 89(1). 30–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lev-Ari, Shiri
2017 Talking to fewer people leads to having more malleable linguistic representations. PLoS ONE 12(8). e01835593. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018a Social network size can influence linguistic malleability and the propagation of linguistic change. Cognition 176. 31–39. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018b The influence of social network size on speech perception. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71(10). 2249–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018c People with larger social networks are better at predicting what someone will say but not how they will say it. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 34(1). 101–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maclagan, Margaret A., Elizabeth Gordon & Gillian Lewis
1999 Women and sound change: Conservative and innovative behavior by the same speakers. Language Variation and Change 11. 19–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCormick, Tyler H., Matthew J. Salganik & Tian Zheng
2010 How many people do you know? Efficiently estimating personal network size. Journal of the American Statistical Association 105(489). 59–70. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milroy, James
1993 On the social origins of language change. In Charles Jones (ed.), Historical Linguistics: Problems and Perspectives. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Milroy, James & Lesley Milroy
1985 Linguistic change, social network and speaker innovation. Journal of Linguistics 21. 339–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milroy, Lesley
1980 Language and social networks. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Milroy, Lesley & James Milroy
1992 Social network and social class: Toward an integrated sociolinguistic model. Language in Society 21(1). 1–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu, Helene Raumolin-Brunberg & Heikki Mannila
2011 The diffusion of language change in real time: Progressive and conservative individuals and the time depth of change. Language Variation and Change 23. 1–43. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oushiro, Livia
2016 Social and structural constraints in lectal cohesion. Lingua 173–173. 116–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Josef Fruehwald, Keelan Evanini & Jiahong Yuan
2011 FAVE Program Suite [Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction]. University of Pennsylvania. fave.ling.upenn.edu.Google Scholar
Sharma, Devyani
2017 Scalar effects of social networks on language variation. Language Variation and Change 29. 393–418. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sneller, Betsy
2015 A community divided: Co-occurrence in retreat from local features. Poster presented at UKLVC 10, University of York, Sept. 2.
Stewart, Mary E. & Mitsuhiko Ota
2008 Lexical effects on speech perception in individuals with ‘autistic’ traits. Cognition 109. 157–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tamminga, Meredith
2019 Interspeaker covariation in Philadelphia vowel changes. Language Variation and Change 31(2). 119–133. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thorburn, Jennifer
2014 Dialect development in Nain, Nunatsiavut: Emerging English in a Canadian Aboriginal community. St. John’s Memorial University of Newfoundland: Ph.D. thesis.Google Scholar
Wagner, Suzanne Evans & Ashley Hesson
2014 Individual sensitivity to the frequency of socially meaningful linguistic cues affects language attitudes. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 33(6). 651–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Waters, Cathleen & Sali Tagliamonte
2017 Is one innovation enough? Leaders, covariation, and language change. American Speech 92(1). 23–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yu, Alan C. L.
2013 Individual differences in socio-cognitive processing and the actuation of sound change. In Alan C. L. Yu (ed.), Origins of sound change: Approaches to phonologization, 201–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yu, Alan C. L., Carissa Abrego-Collier & Morgan Sonderegger
2013 Phonetic imitation from an individual-difference perspective: Subjective attitude, personality and ‘autistic’ traits. PLoS ONE 8(9). e74746. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yu, Alan C. L., Julian Grove, Martina Martinovic & Morgan Sonderegger
2011 Effects of working memory capacity and ‘autistic’ traits on phonotactic effects in speech perception. In Wai Sum Lee (ed.), Proceedings of the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences XVII, Hong Kong: International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences, 2236–2239.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Beddor, Patrice Speeter
2023. Advancements of phonetics in the 21st century: Theoretical and empirical issues in the phonetics of sound change. Journal of Phonetics 98 ► pp. 101228 ff. DOI logo
Knooihuizen, Remco
2023. Explaining Language Change. In The Linguistics of the History of English, ► pp. 17 ff. DOI logo
Pinget, Anne-France
2022. Individual differences in phonetic imitation and their role in sound change. Phonetica 79:5 ► pp. 425 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.