Language Change in Real- and Apparent-Time (Routledge Studies in Language Change) - Softcover

Beaman, Karen V.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1032212195 ISBN 13: 9781032212197

Publisher: Routledge, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Karen V. Beaman is a lecturer of sociolinguistics at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her primary research is a comparative study of Swabian, a dialect spoken in southwestern Germany, which combines a 35-year panel study with a five-generation trend study. Her work investigates language variation and change in both real- and apparent-time, with particular focus on how factors of identity, mobility, and social networks drive or inhibit change.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1032212195
• ISBN 13: 9781032212197
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 334