German Dialects in Real-Time Change

Abstract

Introduction

Traditionally, research on language change has been a post-mortem activity, focused on isolated changes that are complete and often only documented in written texts. In the 1960s the field was advanced considerably by Labovian sociolinguistics and the investigation of “change in progress” adduced through patterns of community-internal linguistic variation correlated with external facts about speakers such as age and class (see Labov 1994 for an overview). However, despite the many benefits of such work on “dynamic synchrony,” we still know relatively little about how language change unfolds over the lifetimes of individual speakers, that is, in real time (cf. Bailey et al. 1991). The logistical challenges of such research are, of course, considerable. Whereas it is straightforward for psycholinguists to observe language development in children over the course of a few years, documenting changes in the verbal behavior of individuals over several decades is by contrast much less feasible. Nevertheless, present theoretical models of language change could be considerably improved by the results of real-time studies.