The role of identity and mobility in reconciling individual and community change: Insight from a combined panel and trend study
Real-time trend studies of language change across the community have been the mainstay of variationist sociolinguistics since its inception (e.g., Labov 1963, 1966). Recently, increased focus has been placed on panel studies investigating individual change across the lifespan (e.g., Sankoff and Blondeau 2007). Yet little research has sought to reconcile the sometimes conflicting findings between panel and trend studies (Sankoff 2006, 2019). This paper tackles this challenge through a combined real-time panel and trend study of Swabian, an Alemannic dialect spoken in southwestern Germany. Twenty participants, interviewed in 1982 and 2017, comprise the panel component, and forty “social twins”, matched for age, sex, and education, interviewed in 2017, comprise the trend component. The findings show that, over time, speakers with high Swabian orientation retain more dialect, while those with high mobility lose more, offering new insight into the role that identity and mobility play in understanding community and lifespan change.
