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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
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three 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

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