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Urban Matters: Current approaches in variationist sociolinguistics
Edited by Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg Oberdorfer
[Studies in Language Variation 27] 2021
► pp. 27–60

Identity and mobility in linguistic change across the lifespan

The case of Swabian German

ORCID logo | University of Tübingen
Identity construction and mobility have been shown to influence dialect performance and play a critical role in language change (Blommaert 2014; Britain 2016; Coupland 2001; Johnstone 2011). To investigate the relative importance of identity and mobility and their role in language change, this paper presents the results of a 35-year panel study with 20 speakers of Swabian German. Twelve linguistic variables, six phonological and six morphosyntactic, reveal how identity and mobility influence speakers’ choice of dialect variants. The findings from the panel study, in comparison with an ongoing trend study, offer new understandings in dialect retention and attrition, revealing how ‘feeling Swabian’ and a ‘sense of place’ play a vital role in our understanding of dialect change across the lifespan.
Keywords: language variation, language change, panel studies, lifespan change, identity, mobility, dialect attrition, German dialects
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research background
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Speech communities
    • 3.2Swabian corpus
    • 3.3Transcription
    • 3.4Dialect Density Index (DDI)
    • 3.5Extra-linguistic predictors
      • 3.5.1Swabian Orientation Index (SOI)
      • 3.5.2Swabian Mobility Index (SMI)
    • 3.6Statistical methods
    • 3.7Interviewer effect
  • 4.Analyses and results
    • 4.1Dialect density across the lifespan
    • 4.2Extralinguistic constraints on dialect density
      • 4.2.1Community and Swabian orientation
      • 4.2.2Speaker sex and Swabian orientation
      • 4.2.3Speaker sex and geographic mobility
    • 4.3Change in linguistic variables
    • 4.4Types of individual speaker change
    • 4.5Some ethnographic observations
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • 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 rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 16 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.27.02bea
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