Karen V. Beaman

This pioneering comparative study provides the first quantitative, large-scale, cross-language analysis of subject pronoun variation, with a dataset representing more than 1000 speakers, twenty-four communities, and 6 languages: Persian, Spanish, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, and Swabian. Over 250,000 sites of pronominal variation are analysed to reveal community-specific and universal patterns of pronoun use, providing readers with key insights into how communities vary in their characteristic rates of pronoun use and in their sensitivity to linguistic and social conditioning factors. The project employs a range of quantitative measures, statistical techniques, and visualization tools to assist readers in investigating pronominal variation from cognitive, linguistic, and social perspectives. The book includes a freely downloadable R Markdown Project for readers to use in replicating and extending the methods provided to their own projects.

This pioneering comparative study provides the first quantitative, large-scale, cross-language analysis of subject pronoun variation, with a dataset representing more than 1000 speakers, twenty-four communities, and 6 languages: Persian, Spanish, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, and Swabian. Over 250,000 sites of pronominal variation are analysed to reveal community-specific and universal patterns of pronoun use, providing readers with key insights into how communities vary in their characteristic rates of pronoun use and in their sensitivity to linguistic and social conditioning factors. The project employs a range of quantitative measures, statistical techniques, and visualization tools to assist readers in investigating pronominal variation from cognitive, linguistic, and social perspectives. The book includes a freely downloadable R Markdown Project for readers to use in replicating and extending the methods provided to their own projects.

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.

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.