Language Variation and Language Change Across the Lifespan

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.

Karen V. Beaman received her Ph.D in sociolinguistics at Queen Mary, University of London and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Her research interests concern language variation, coherence and change, with particular focus on how factors of identity, mobility and social networks drive or inhibit change.

Isabelle Buchstaller is professor of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her research interests include language variation and change across time. She is the author of Quotatives: New trends and sociolinguistic implications (2014) and has co-edited four volumes, most recently, panel research in language variation and change (with Suzanne Evans Wagner).