Language Variation and Language Change Across the Lifespan

Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives from Panel Studies

Karen V. Beaman, Isabelle Buchstaller, Karen V. Beaman, Isabelle Buchstaller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429638527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

Part I

Revelations from Past Trend and Panel Studies

1The Beginnings of Panel Research

Individual Language Variation, Change, and Stability in Eskilstuna

Eva Sundgren, Isabelle Buchstaller, and Karen V. Beaman

1.1 Introduction

This chapter complements Sankoff’s (2018) report on the early days of panel data collection by describing the creation of the first-ever large-scale panel corpus, the Eskilstuna panel study, a little-known forerunner to the famous Montreal corpus collected by Sankoff and her collaborators starting in 1971. Unbeknownst to the Montreal group, in 1967–1968, Bengt Nordberg recorded 83 individuals in Eskilstuna, Sweden as part of a larger drive towards the sociolinguistic investigation of language variation and change in the Nordic countries (e.g., Nordberg 1972, 1985). These data would later become the first slice of the panel and trend dataset to be discussed here.

In 1996, almost 30 years after the initial data collection, the first author revisited the area as part of her PhD research, the project Continuity and Change in Present-Day Swedish: Eskilstuna Revisited, directed by Nordberg. One goal of the new study was to combine the merits of a trend study and panel study. Apart from the Montreal corpus, few panel investigations had been conducted at that time and those that had been done usually covered only a relatively short time span or comprised only a few variables and/or speaker groups (see e.g., Paunonen 1996; Baugh 1996). The first author sought to find as many informants as possible from the original 83 interviewed by Nordberg in 1967. She was successful in re-recording 13 individuals who form the panel component of this study. This panel corpus was complemented by 72 new informants who comprise the trend study. The combined data pool thus allows the exploration of both individual and generational language change over a period of nearly 30 years.

The guiding epistemology of this chapter is the analysis of the behavior of individual speakers across their lifespans. In order to effectively interpret the results of the panel study, the findings on intra-speaker malleability are compared to the concurrent trend study, which by definition forms a more representative sample of the wider community (see Sankoff and Blondeau 2007). Finally, we describe some of the panel informants in detail, considering factors that impact their linguistic behavior across the lifespan, most notably, the speakers’ social standing and their relationship to the local community as measured by a social integration index. We argue that in-depth considerations of legacy studies, such as the present one, are useful not only for a broader understanding of the history of the field but also for the valuable insights they bring into the study of intra-speaker malleability and its role in the progression of language change.

1.2 Data and Methods in Early Panel Research

We start by describing the speech community and the empirical methods developed in the creation of the trend and panel corpora. As Sankoff (2018) pointed out for the Montreal study, the lack of precedent meant that methodological choices in the creation of the panel corpus had to be made on the spot. The Eskilstuna study in particular relied on the long ethnographic tradition of Scandinavian sociolinguistics and on data collection methods spearheaded by Loman (1972), Nordberg (1985, 1994), and Thelander (1982). The original analyses of the Eskilstuna data are thus firmly situated in Nordic sociolinguists’ understanding of the influence of different factors on individual language variation, change and stability at the time (consider Omdal 1967; Kristensen 1979; Hanssen et al. 1978; and Thelander 1979). Some of the parameters operationalized in the Eskilstuna panel study (such as the establishment of a comprehensive index of local community involvement, a measure of social standing and mobility, in addition to the traditional socio-demographic categories) were trailblazing, placing the Eskilstuna project ahead of its time in exploring the effect of individual aspects of the speakers’ life histories on language change across the lifespan. This method used in the Eskilstuna project is now considered “intersectional” (Levon 2015), an approach which integrates speakers’ social mobility, professional trajectories, social standing, gendered roles, and community involvement.

1.2.1 The Eskilstuna Community

Eskilstuna is a medium-sized town in central Sweden about 100 km west of the capital Stockholm and situated in what is traditionally known as the central Swedish dialect area (Wessén 1970). In 1967, the town had about 66,000 inhabitants. Due to geo-political restructuring, in 1971 Eskilstuna incorporated the surrounding five rural districts and the town district of Torshälla. Hence, by 1996 when the second tranche of data collection took place, the local Eskilstuna authority had officially grown to 90,000 inhabitants.

Importantly, there is a distinct difference between the Eskilstuna of 1967 and the...