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Bowie & Yaeger-Dror
Language change in real time
David Bowie and Malcah Yaeger-Dror
Forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology—Honeybone & Salmons (eds)
1. Introduction and overview
1.1 Types of language change
The traditional view of the critical period for language, going back to Lenneberg (1967), is that
it is part of a biological process: a decline in language learning ability reflects a maturational
change in brain development. This view makes two strong predictions, namely, that children
will be better at acquiring language than adults, and that after a “critical period” (roughly
corresponding to puberty) such linguistic flexibility is lost or, at best, significantly curtailed.
This view has been challenged in recent years, and it is clear that individuals change their
linguistic behavior later in life to some extent, but the assumption that the core of one’s
linguistic system is essentially fixed at some point prior to or during adolescence remains
dominant (see Hale et al. this volume).
This has direct application to studies of linguistic variation in speech communities as well
as studies of linguistic change. Because many studies of linguistic change are now carried out
“in the field” rather than the library, many studies cited here can be found in “variationist”
publications. (See also, e.g., D’Arcy, Schreier, Foulkes & Vihman, Jones, and Eckman & Iverson,
this volume.) One strength that such studies lend to the analysis of historical phonology is the
ability to track both changes, and individual speakers’ perception of (and attitudes toward)
those changes. Recent historical studies in Scandinavia (Nahkola & Saanilahti 1996, Nevalainen
& Fitzmaurice 2011, Nevalainen et al. 2011, Paunonen 1996; Sundgren 2002), and the western
hemisphere (Boyarin 1978, Kemp & Yaeger-Dror 1981, Fitzmaurice & Minkova 2008, Phillips,
this volume) have shown that the methodology and insights gained from field studies discussed
in this chapter can be adapted for classical historical analyses.
As Labov (1994) points out, in synchronic studies that plot the distribution of a particular
sociolinguistic variable against speaker age, there are four possibilities, shown in Table 1. If a
study of a feature in, say, 1970, shows no age differentiation among speakers (the “flat”
pattern) that feature may not be undergoing change in the community (Interpretation #1).
(“Stable” unchanged linguistic behavior is generally of less interest to historical linguists than
the other three possibilities.) However, this is only the case if both the individual speakers and
the community as a whole are stable with respect to the feature. Another interpretation of a flat
pattern is possible: all the speakers in the community are changing together. In such a case, no
age differences appear because older and younger speakers are all at the same stage in a change
that is affecting all of them equally (Interpretation #4, referred to as “communal change”, of
very real interest to historical linguists), reflecting “diffusion” through a community (Labov
2007).
Synchronic Pattern
Individual
Community
Interpretation
1.
Flat
Stable
Stable
No change
2.
Monotonic slope with
Unstable
Stable
Age grading
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age
Generational
Monotonic slope with
3.
Stable
Unstable
change/“apparent
age
time”
4.
Flat
Unstable
Unstable
Communal change
Unstable
Unstable
Lifespan change
Monotonic slope with
5.
age
Table 1: Comparison of five patterns of linguistic change (adapted from Labov 1994: 83,
Sankoff 2006: 1004)
The other pattern of interest is a monotonic slope with age, which again has two possible
interpretations. One is that the community remains stable over time, but that, generation after
generation, individuals change in that particular feature as they get older. This interpretation
(#2, commonly referred to as “age grading”) means that as individual cohorts of speakers get
older, it is typical for them to show a steadily increasing (or decreasing) use of one variant of a
studied feature. Examples of age grading include Fisher’s (1958) description of (ing) variation,
and Van Hofwegen & Wolfram’s (2010) description of ain’t and multiple negation. Alternately,
individuals may retain their childhood patterns with each individual age cohort of speakers
coming into the speech community increasing (or decreasing) their use of the variant. This is
the classic “apparent time” interpretation (#3), in which a monotonic slope according to age,
measured at one point in time, is taken as a reflection of instability in the community, or change
in progress, further reflecting “transmission” of a change from generation to generation
(following Labov 2007), with examples provided by much of Labov’s work over the last 50 years
(Gordon, this volume).
Until recently, the default assumption in sociolinguistics has been that an apparent time
analysis is the best way to interpret data showing monotonic age differences, while historical
studies have preferred real time analysis. However, in order for either assumption to be valid
the critical period hypothesis for language acquisition must apply (Bailey et al. 1991, Bailey
2005, Tillery & Bailey 2003), and so if speakers’ ages place their linguistic systems in a
temporal relationship with each other, the childhood linguistic system presumably determines
adult speech production, and adult linguistic production is stable. Therefore, if speakers
actually alter their linguistic systems over the course of their lives, both historical and
sociolinguistic research models require modification.
Chambers & Trudgill (1980) noted that many studies have provided evidence of language
change, since older and younger speakers very frequently differ in their speech patterns, but
they described at least the vast majority of these analyses as evidence of linguistic “change in
apparent time.” They then posited a distinction between that and some hypothetical change that
would continue even in the lives of individual speakers who had reached and passed this critical
period, referring to the latter as “change in real time” or “lifespan change” (Interpretation #5,
Sankoff 2005: 1011).
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While linguists deferred to psycholinguists by accepting the concept of a “critical period”
for language acquisition (Lenneberg 1967) and understood it to preclude dialect change past
adolescence, in actuality there was very little, if any, study of speakers “in real time” as they
age. Chambers & Trudgill stated that, therefore, linguists should carry out studies to test for
change past adolescence, rather than simply assume that no variation is possible for a mature
speaker. In addition, they pointed out that tracking the same speakers for many years would
also facilitate distinguishing between change in real time (#5) and age grading (#2, Section
1.3).
Tracking individual speakers permits us to distinguish evidence for each type of linguistic
change in Table 1. For example, if a study conducted at one point in time demonstrated a
difference between older and younger speakers, and a later study shows the same difference
with no advancement, this would provide clear evidence of age grading. If there is instability,
with each individual’s speech stable across the time periods sampled but community speech
patterns varying, this would provide evidence of change in apparent time passed on via
transmission (Labov 2007). Finally, if speakers change across their lifespan (as evidenced by
studies conducted at different points in time) but at all analysis times there appears to be
stability within the community, this is understood to be communal change, which can only take
place via diffusion through the adult population—and it is claimed that this type of change,
since it does occur past the assumed critical period, is more likely to be less complex and to
involve lexical or syntactic changes (Labov 1994, 2007).
Nevertheless, the sort of lifespan change proposed by Sankoff (2007) has been supported
as more panel studies have been conducted, finding, for example, individual speakers who
initially follow conservative linguistic norms but appear to “catch up” later (Thibault & Daveluy
1989; Yaeger-Dror 1994, 1996; Wagner 2012), or vernacularity peaking in eighth grade for
Southern school children before receding (Van Hofwegen & Wolfram 2010; Van Hofwegen,
forthcoming).
This chapter synthesizes work that permits comparison of sound change in real and
apparent time to present the current state of the art, considering the evidence in light of Table 1
and the theories proposed in relation to it. We begin by briefly mentioning some challenges to
the critical period hypothesis from studies of language acquisition. We then discuss the sorts of
evidence that can only come from studies of change in real time, and how some of those studies
have challenged the concept of a critical period for language acquisition.
1.2. Second language and the critical period
Since apparent-time analyses rely so strongly on a rather strict interpretation of the critical
period hypothesis (Bailey 2005), it is worth mentioning that even research on second language
acquisition, which used to take this critical period as a given, have found that differences
between adult and child language acquisition cannot always be ascribed to limitations on
plasticity arising from brain maturation Some of these differences may be the result of differing
inputs (Durrant & Schmitt 2008, Muñoz 2008), interference from a speaker’s first language
(Hopp 2007, Rothman 2008), or even language attitudes (Moyer 2007, Llamas & Watt 2010,
Hoffman 2010; see also the review in Horwitz 2010). Further, contrary to conventional wisdom,
adult learners have been shown to outperform child learners in some domains (White 1998).
Consequently, it seems that the apparent advantage of child (second) language learners over
adult language learners may have been over-estimated (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam 2009).
Finally, adult and late childhood learners of language do not show the steep drop-off in
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acquisition ability that one would expect from critical period constraints (Muñoz & Singleton
2011). All this underscores the fact that speakers have the ability to acquire linguistic features
later in life than is often assumed.
1.3. Option 2: Age grading and language change
Age grading, with individual variation through time but no resultant linguistic change within
the community, can be contrasted with linguistic change where the speech of an entire
community is affected and speakers (generally) continue to advance the change until it
eventually is completed and everyone uses the newer form. The focus of most sociophonetic
research has been on dialect change, with age grading treated as a sort of stepchild, but both
are critical to a thorough understanding of language.
Studies of age grading have found that communally stable variables can exhibit a
curvilinear pattern with age, with adolescents and the elderly using nonstandard variants at a
higher rate than working-age adults. For example, Fischer (1958) found age grading in a study
of (ing), with the [ɪ n] realization stable across generations, but favored by the young (see
Wagner 2012a,b for more recent evidence). Age grading is also clearly involved in lexical
variation and change (Rickford & Price 2013), including the size of a speaker’s vocabulary:
Sankoff and Lessard (1975) found that speakers of all classes add to their vocabulary as they
age.
It is only possible to fully recognize age grading by conducting studies of communities
over real time, since confirming that age grading is occurring requires that a community as a
whole is not changing between (at least) two points in time, and that individual age groups
show the same distribution at one point in time as people who are the same age at a later point
in time. Further, a complete description of linguistic change requires an analysis of changes
which allow age grading to be distinguished from other changes, whether the study involves
“apparent” or “real” time data, and more studies of such a type will result in a better ability to
tease apart various forms of change.
1.4. Methods of studying changes over real time
Soon after Chambers & Trudgill’s (1980) challenge to conduct studies of language change in real
time, several groups of researchers took it up. To distinguish between a diachronic study based
on a new set of interviewees and a study which follows the same set of speakers for several
years as Chambers & Trudgill (1980) had suggested, a distinction was drawn between a trend
(or cross-sectional) study approach where the different speakers are used, and a longitudinal
(or panel) approach where the same speakers are compared at two times (see Labov 1994,
Blondeau 2001). Some groups took advantage of older recordings to permit comparison of
speech at different times (e.g., Kemp & Yaeger-Dror 1983, Van de Velde et al. 1996, Bowie 2005,
Harrington 2006, Gordon et al. 2009, Van Hofwegen & Wolfram 2009, Coggshall & Becker
2010); these often took the form of panel studies. Trend studies (such as Cedergren 1988,
Trudgill 1988, Blake & Josey 2003, xxx et al 2007, Van de Velde et al 1996), though, have the
advantage that they are less costly and less fraught with complications, but they are much more
likely to risk a systematic mismatch between the recording situations in the two corpora,
making comparison difficult at best (Thibault & Vincent 1990).
As a result, wherever possible, a corpus records the same speakers some years after the
first recordings, and in the same social situation: for example, a Yiddish singer (Prince 1987,
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1988); the Queen of England (Harrington 2006, 2007; Harrington et al. 2000a, 2000b, 2005); a
few Americans in the UK (Shockey 1984); the Beatles and Rolling Stones (Trudgill 1983);
California teens (Baugh 1996, Rickford & Price 2013); Alabama adults (Feagin 1990, 2003); US
teens (Rickford 2009; Wagner 2012a,b); broadcast archives from Montreal (Kemp & YaegerDror 1991), Belgium and the Netherlands (van de Velde et al. 1996), Israel (Yaeger-Dror 1993),
and Utah (Bowie 2005, 2009, 2011); political archives (Yaeger-Dror & Hall-Lew 2002, Hall-Lew
et al 2012); and speakers from the UK’s 7 Up Series (Sankoff 2004, Poplack & Lealess 2011,
Rhodes 2012).
A panel study can have as few as one or two speakers recorded for particular purposes,
but a systematic plan permits comparison of many speakers at two points in time: for example,
the Montreal research group, which had already developed an impressive corpus to study
change in apparent time (Sankoff & Sankoff 1973), re-interviewed 32 of the speakers from 1971
in 1984 (Thibault & Vincent 1990), forming the basis for many subsequent studies of change in
phonology, syntax, lexicon, and discourse particles (Sankoff & Blondeau 2007; Blondeau 2001,
2006; Thibault & Daveluy 1989; Wagner & Sankoff 2011; Yaeger-Dror 1989, 1993, 1994, 1997).
Of course, only those speakers who were part of the original study and for whom there are
interviews from both 1971 and 1984 could form the panel study of change in real-time
(Blondeau & Sankoff 2007; Daveluy & Thibault 1989; Thibault & Vincent 1990). New adolescent
speakers who had been too young at the time of the original study were added to provide a
trend study of changes in adolescent speech between 1971 and 1984 (Thibault & Vincent 1990).
With this, a new benchmark had been set, with a new goal to provide data from panel studies of
speech.
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Speech community and variables
Charmey, 6 phonetic changes (Hermann
1929, Labov 1966: 278, 301; 1994)
British letters (Raumolin-Brunberg 1996)
Time 1 finding
apparent time;
from below
British letters (Arnaud 1998)
The queen’s English (Harrington et al.
2000a, 2000b, Harrinton 2006, 2007)
Martha’s Vineyard, (ay) nucleus raising
(Labov 1963, 1994, Blake & Josey 2003,
Pope et al. 2007)
European Yiddish vowel nuclei; (Prince
1987, 1988)
New York City, (r) (Labov 1966, 1994)
Norwich, beer-bear merger (Trudgill 1972,
1988)
Norwich, backing of /ɛl/, [ʔ] for /t/
(Trudgill 1972, 1988)
Norwich, moan-mown merger, [eː ]
(Trudgill 1988)
Norwich, r labialization, (th/dh)
“fronting” (Trudgill 1988)
Panama City, (ch)-lenition (Cedergren
1987)
Glasgow, glottal stop (Macaulay 1977,
Chambers 1995, Stuart-Smith 1999, StuartSmith et al. 2011)
Eskilstuna, Sweden, 7 morphological,
morphophonological variables (Sundgren
2002)
Hanhijoki, Finland, [r] -> [d] (Kurki
2004)
Virrat, Finland, 10 changes (Nahkola &
Saanilahti 2004)
Tours, France, ne-deletion (Ashby 2001)
Carioca, (r)-aspiration (Callou et al.
1998)
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; several
morphological and phonological
variables (DePaiva & Duarte 2003)
Montreal, (Ation)>(a:tion) (Kemp &
Yaeger-Dror 1991)
Montreal, (ER) (Yaeger-Dror 1993,
apparent time;
from below
apparent time;
from above
apparent time; from
below
apparent time; from
below
apparent time;
from above
apparent time
apparent time; from
below
age grading
apparent time;
from above
apparent time;
from above
apparent time;
from above
apparent time; from
below
Time 2 finding
3 V changes continuing;
3 C changes stable
--th>--s as 3rd person change
RT increased ratio of
progressives
Pattern of vowel shifts
twd new norm
possible reversal (Blake &
Josey); possible
continuation (Pope)
Shift toward “prestige”:
open-class lexicon
age grading > change
continuing change
continuing, new style
distinction
vestigial
rapid adoption by younger
speakers
change; age grading (young
“spike”)
age grading; continuing
(1990s)
slower continuing change;
age, class and gender
effects
continuing change
continuing change
continuing change
age grading (young “spike”)
apparent time; from
above/below
continuing change
apparent time;
social class
apparent time;
continuing; vestigial by
WWII
continuing change except
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Yaeger-Dror & Kemp 1992)
social class
Montreal, R/aR,oer (Yaeger-Dror 1986,
1994, 1996)
apparent time;
social class
Montreal, r/R (Sankoff & Blondeau 2007)
apparent time;
change from above
Montreal, alors (Thibault & Daveluy
1989, 1991)
Montreal, t’sais (Thibault & Daveluy
1989, 1991)
Montreal, t’sais/j’v’dire (Thibault &
Daveluy 1989)
Montreal, only (Thibault & Daveluy 1989)
Montreal, we (Laberge 1978, Blondeau
2001)
Montreal, periphrastic future (Blondeau
2006, Wagner & Sankoff 2011)
Montreal, extension particles (Dubois
1992)
Springville, Texas, Southern Vowel Shift
(7 features) (Bailey et al. 1991, 2001,
Cukor-Avila 2002)
Springville, Texas, double modals, fixin’
to (Bailey et al. 1991, 2001)
Springville, Texas, verbs of quotation
(Cukor-Avila 2002)
Danish, possessives (Brink & Lund 1979)
for retirees,
etymological/lexical sets
maintained
continuing change except
for retirees,
etymological/lexical sets
maintained
continuing change
age graded, but only middle
class
continuing rapid change
apparent time
continuing rapid change;
communal change
continuing change; age
graded
continuing change to nous;
age graded
age graded, social class.
apparent time
age graded, social class.
apparent time
continuation, with ethnic
variation
apparent time
continuation, with ethnic
variation
continuing rapid change;
age graded
continuing change
apparent time
apparent time
apparent time,
from above
Helsinki, Finland, possessives (Paunonen
apparent time,
continuing change, except
1996)
from above
those over 50 on first study
Table 2: A partial list of apparent- and real-time studies (Adapted from Sankoff 2006)
Other research has since provided panel studies of change in other locations, some
discussed below, with a selection in Table 2. Similar in-depth studies of a large group of
speakers have been carried out in Québec (Elsig & Poplack 2009), Brazil (Callou et al. 1998; De
Paiva et al. 2003), Denmark (Gregersen 2009; Gregersen & Barner-Rasmussen 2011; Brink &
Lund 1979; Kammacher et al. 2011), Finland (Kurki 2004; Nahkola & Saanilahti 2004; Paunonen
1996), Sweden (Sundgren 2002), and sections of London (e.g., Kerswill 1996).
In each study the goal has been to determine the scope and limitations of speakers’
abilities to change their speech, as discussed below. For the most part, we limit our review to
longitudinal/panel studies: Section 2 discusses evidence of speech plasticity past adolescence
within given dialect areas, including methodological issues. Section 3 treats variation and
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change for speakers who move from their original dialect area. Section 4 presents conclusions
we can draw from these studies, and proposes new directions for future research.
2. Evidence of plasticity past adolescence
2.1 Changing presentation of self during the formative years leading to language change
Some work on change in real-time does not purport to determine change in real time per se, but
the changing attitudes and changing self-image of young speakers. Thus, although they do not
directly address the issue of change in real time past the critical period, they still address the
topic of fluidity of identity management, particularly during the formative years. Van Hofwegen
& Wolfram (2010) and Renn (2011) found no particular linguistic pattern that was consistent
for all children across their years of schooling, but found that there was a general tendency to
aim toward the standard in the lower grades, and then to shift toward the ethnic vernacular in
the teenage years (with a peak in early adolescence), which was followed by “regression” away
from stigmatized forms later in adolescence. One interesting result is the extent to which
individual children vary, adopting different socially-marked features at different ages, without
showing generalizable patterns of adoption or rejection of stigmatized variables (as often
found among adolescents and adults, as discussed below).
2.2 Results from studies of teenagers
In studies of preteens and teens, Eckert (1989, 2000, 2008), Moore (2004, 2010), MendozaDenton (2008), Rampton (2010), Bigham (2010), Wagner (2012b), and Lawson (2011) have all
found a tendency for high school students to shift toward an “ideal” phonology for their specific
social group. Eckert (1989) showed that even before college, high school “jocks” who are
planning to move to larger communities and not return home have begun to shift their vowel
phonology toward a more urban(e) pattern, while the “burnouts” have begun to shift toward a
more local pattern. There is often apparent stabilization in adolescence (Tagliamonte & D’Arcy
2009, D’Arcy this volume, Van Hofwegen forthcoming), which recedes as teens move into the
“linguistic market” (Eckert 1996, 2000; Mendoza-Denton 2008; Moore 2004, 2010). Along
these lines, Moore (2010) documented how shifts in social practice by two groups of British
teens were accompanied by specific linguistic changes, while Mendoza-Denton (2008)
demonstrated that even within a short time span, a shift from one high school gang allegiance
to another is accompanied by specific phonological (along with sartorial) changes, and similar
findings have been found by Drager et al. (2010).
Coupland (2010: 103), in commenting on such findings, points out that “the emergence of
identities and of new linguistic forms” are particularly salient in (transitional) teen identities.
Evidence from both apparent and real time studies supports the understanding that there is an
emergence of age-relevant identities, and these identities are altered as teenagers transition to
other newly age-relevant identities, such as the college-age linguistic market or the adult jobrelated linguistic market. So, for example, Cukor-Avila & Bailey (2011) studied the production of
several variables by individuals in a Texas community and found that teens initially produced
similar behavior, then diverged through the teenage years into early adulthood.
These studies, taken together, present severe difficulties for any claim based on the
critical period hypothesis that the core elements of one’s linguistic system are frozen in place
by the age of twelve or earlier. If anything, they show that there is a great deal of linguistic
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shifting beyond that point, and that these shifts not only correlate with social networks and
allegiances, but they can also result in members of any one age cohort becoming more disparate
as adolescence progresses.
Similarly, while Alim’s (2004) and Cutler’s (2010 inter alia) work does not actually track
change in teenage speakers’ phonology, they do follow teenagers whose role models are socially
stigmatized within the linguistic marketplace (and therefore dispreferred in the “standard” job
market) and may not reflect the speaker’s own background, and so maximize the chance that a
later study might find a shift away from the current phonological preferences as they enter the
job market. Cutler’s recent study of immigrant youth who identify with the hip-hop community
(2010 inter alia), for example, has shown the degree to which their phonology appears to reflect
their choice of role models. Unfortunately, while her teens’ phonology does not reflect their
ethnic background, and presumably has gravitated toward hip-hop phonology during their teen
years, there is evidence neither of their pre-hip hop nor adult phonology. Presumably, following
these individuals through their adult years in a study of change in real-time would offer a
glimpse into their subsequent adult phonology once they have become members of the linguistic
marketplace and must earn their living. While Cutler’s work does not purport to study change in
real time, it does provide a tantalizing glimpse into a research direction which will presumably
reveal the extent to which phonological change continues after adolescence, and perhaps the
extent to which conflicting motivating factors like communities of practice (Eckert 2000) and
the replacement of the “heterosexual market” (Eckert 1989 inter alia) with the job market and
the “linguistic marketplace” as initially formulated (Sankoff & Laberge 1978) are involved in
this process.
2.3 Moving into the college and working years
Other recent studies have found similar changes continuing into the college years: De
Decker (2006), Bigham (2010), and Wagner (2012b), for example, found that college students
adapt to the larger urban community that they have moved to, at least in Ontario and Illinois
where the urban variety has more prestige than their more rural home community’s variety. In
fact, in Bigham’s study, the shift toward the “big city” dialect may have already taken place
during high school, as occurred with Eckert’s (1989) jocks. While Bigham inferred that the rural
speakers had all left high school with a more rural dialect, De Decker compared the panel’s high
school phonology with that of a year later, and found that the move into college had an effect.
Wagner (2012b) studied teenage girls as they shifted from high school to the college
“market.” She found greater consistency, with preferred ethnic designation and level of
aspiration (as defined by choice of university) both influencing the degree to which girls shifted
their (ing) between senior year of high school and freshman year in college. She demonstrates
that even when all the students are from the same high school community and continue to
college within a single dialect area, those who continue to a “nationally oriented” (read:
research university) campus will weaken their local dialect, while those who choose a
community college or local parochial campus retain local stigmatized features into their college
years. In addition, Rhodes (2012) tracked the vowel system of one 7 Up interviewee and showed
that the greatest change in his vowel system occurred not during his teenage years, but as he
settled into the job market.
Baugh (1996) and Rickford & Price (2013), like Cukor-Avila & Bailey (2011), followed
African-American English-speaking youth as they exited their teens and entered the workforce.
Although the studies take place in three widely dispersed areas, all three support the conclusion
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that the same interviewee, even with the same interviewer in the same social setting, can adapt
radically toward the more “standard” dialect features as s/he enters the work force.
Alongside all this, the initial trajectory shown by speakers can echo later in life. So, for
example, in research on changes in Montreal French (r), those who had at least a small
percentage of the newer (uvular) variant in their youth were likely to continue to change in the
direction of the newer norm, as they grew older (Sankoff et al. 2001).
2.4 Evidence from Adults
There is also some earlier work demonstrating that a community of adults can shift their
phonology toward a specific phonological model. This work was carried out without the time
depth for change in real time suggested by Chambers & Trudgill (1980), but both the Milroys’
(Milroy 1980; Milroy & Milroy 1985) work in Belfast and Trudgill’s (1988) reanalysis of
Norwich permit us a window onto change in real time. In Milroy’s corpus, the Catholic women—
perhaps motivated by the linguistic marketplace need for “Protestant” phonology in their
workplaces—shifted their vowel system toward the Protestant pattern. Similarly, Trudgill’s
reanalysis of Norwich is a trend study, but reveals diffusion (Labov 2007) of stigmatized
“estuary” features like theta fronting (e.g., with realized as [wɪ f]) and r labializing into the
Norwich area in the late 1970s, with teenagers adopting the London working class innovation.
2.5 After the working years are over
While the main focus of many studies of change in real time has been speakers who are
relatively recently past the claimed critical period, Yaeger-Dror (1994, 1997) included older
speakers, who, it was assumed, would not change at all. Her findings demonstrated not only
that there was a significant change for these speakers, but that the change was toward an older
phonology. Given the small sample size it was difficult to determine whether this could be
traced to loss of hearing (as in early studies, where Labov found speakers’ accents stronger
when they were hearing white noise), loss of access to (or interest in) the linguistic
marketplace, or merely a shift in community to one no longer including younger speakers.
Of course, a finding that older adults exhibit linguistic changes is not necessarily
surprising, given findings of gerontological research. Gerontologists have consistently found
that individuals in a given age cohort increasingly differ cognitively as they age. Some of this is
the result of illness, injury, or other pathology, but it holds true even absent such factors (e.g.
Christensen et al. 1999; Hultsch et al. 2002; Barnes et al. 2007). Thus the linguistic finding that
older adults exhibit sociolinguistic change is, perhaps, simply to be expected.
2.6. The use and importance of panel-study corpora
Panel studies provide clear evidence for linguistic change across the lifespan in real time;
Gillian Sankoff and colleagues (Sankoff et al. 1991; Sankoff & Wagner 2006; Sankoff & Blondeau
2007; Wagner & Sankoff 2011, Sankoff 2013) have pointed out that some changes in the
Montreal system appear to be categorical over both apparent and real time, while others appear
to be more fluid. These studies have generally found that “most individual speakers…were
stable after the critical period, with phonological patterns set by the end of adolescence [while
a] sizeable minority…made substantial changes. The window of opportunity for linguistic
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modification in later life may be expanded with rapid change in progress when linguistic
variables take on social significance” (Sankoff & Blondeau 2007: 560).
Panel studies such as the Montreal French 1971-1984 study provide clear and simple
comparisons of several features for the sampled speakers. So, for example, Sankoff &
Blondeau’s (2007: Figure 3) study of r in Montreal found that seven of the ten younger speakers
who had not already adopted dorsal (R) by 1971 were those most likely to adopt the newer
variant by 1984. Similarly, Wagner & Sankoff (2011) found that 18 of 21 upper-middle- and
middle-class speakers increased their use of the inflected future, as did 13 of the 18 mid-range
speakers, but only 7 of 20 working-class speakers. In fact, 7 of the 20 working-class speakers
actually decreased their use of the inflected future over real time (Suzanne Wagner, p.c., 20
Sept. 2011). Thus, what at first blush appears to be age grading is actually an effect of members
of different groups of speakers changing their speech, but in opposite directions.
Because a panel was used for the Montreal study, it is relatively simple to contrast the
change in real time for the feature (R) with the age grading noted by Thibault (1991) and
Thibault & Daveluy (1989), who demonstrated that the choice of alors as a filler is a feature that
middle class speakers “catch” (as it were) as they reach their forties. In a panel study change in
real time can be contrasted with age grading, change in apparent time, or stable sex or social
status variation; however, in order to do this each speaker must be analyzed individually.
Acoustic analysis of diphthongization and shift of the Montreal mid vowels among a
different eight-speaker panel from the Montreal French corpus (Yaeger-Dror 1994, 1997;
Sankoff & Blondeau 2007: 581) established that analysis carried out on each speaker
individually demonstrated that the late adopters of change (like working-class men) were most
likely to advance significantly toward the newer local norm well into middle age. The panel
study of vowels also revealed that the only middle-class speaker interviewed both before and
after retirement had shifted quite radically from the newer norm to a much more conservative
Montreal vowel phonology by the later 1984 study.
Nahkola & Saanilahti (2004) carried out a study of Finnish, with a panel study of adult
speakers (born 1923-1972) recorded in both 1986 and 1996, and sufficient older and younger
speakers to permit more extensive trend analysis of variables. Mapping several changes, they
found that categorical linguistic features generally remain stable, but if a feature is variable the
balance shifts toward the newer variant during the speaker’s years in the workforce. In fact,
even those speakers who were in their sixties when first interviewed appeared to be advancing
toward the newer norm during their seventies, despite (presumably) their retirement from the
work force. One might infer from this that the pattern of phonological change in progress is not
cross-culturally uniform, but that panel corpora from each culture should be evaluated with no
preconceived conclusions concerning expected patterns of change.
Such results demonstrate not only the utility of panel studies, but also the broader fact
that one cannot simply analyze group means for these purposes. Rather, the only valid way to
definitively analyze change in real time is to interview speakers in the same (or at least a very
similar) social situation, and to compare each interview in a sample with the same speaker’s
own earlier interview (Thibault & Vincent 1990, Gregersen 2007, Gregersen & BarnerRasmussen 2011). This provides results that cannot be obtained with analysis of change in
apparent time, or even with a trend study of different speakers at two points in time.
Many small panel studies have been conducted using performance data, leading to what
may feel like a growth industry in panel studies, at least in part because access to the
longitudinal data which seems appropriate for panel studies is relatively simple to acquire from
archival sources. Along these lines, Trudgill (1983) investigated the linguistic production of the
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Rolling Stones and Beatles using performance data from the sixties and seventies, finding that
they altered their native pronunciation (apparently unconsciously) to permit a more US-centric
phonology in songs, which, as their own popularity grew, was then jettisoned for a more British
style. Yaeger-Dror (1993) found a similar pattern among Israeli Hebrew Mizrahi singers.
Van de Velde et al. (1996) obtained radio sound files for the same news or sports
broadcasters in Belgium and the Netherlands over a long stretch of time, and demonstrated that
changes take place even in the most careful broadcast media maintaining a fairly consistent
style of speech, as well as in apparently less careful settings (like post-game euphoria).
Similarly, Bowie (2005, 2009, 2011) has found that individuals show significant phonological
variation over the course of their adult lives even in formal settings (in this case, religious
sermons). Kemp & Yaeger-Dror (1991) showed that pre-election oratory for national figures also
exhibits changing usage, though Yaeger-Dror & Hall-Lew (2002) analyzed American political
speeches and found considerable variation in syntactic constructions by speaker’s region and
interactive situation, but none attributable to change in real time. Harrington (2006, 2007;
Harrington et al. 2000a, 2000b, 2005) showed that even the short speech segments of the
British Queen’s Christmas messages from 1952 to 1960 and 1995 to 2002 provided evidence that
while UK vowel phonology has changed over time, even the queen’s individual phonology has. In
addition, Sankoff’s (2005), Rhodes’ (2012), and Poplack & Lealess’s (2011) work on the 7 Up
series corpus from the UK has showed that careful use of even small potential panel data
sources can be very useful.
Chambers and Trudgill’s (1980) suggestion has borne fruit: Those studies which compare
interactions with speakers several years apart provide evidence of change in real time past
adolescence and can clearly distinguish such change from age-grading. Of course, to carry out
such studies requires particular forethought, with added permissions provided in forms
approved by institutional review boards (or their equivalents), so that the authors can later
return to the same speakers, not to mention the added funding needed for reinterviews, even
before analysis can take place. Ad hoc panel studies can also be carried out using broadcast
corpora (which, if they are already publicly available, sometimes require no human subjects
review), but researchers have no control over their content. In any such study, though, the
“younger” and “older” speakers must each be compared with their own speech rather than with
that of the entire group, and recording situations should be as nearly identical as possible.
3. The effects of second dialect exposure
Even before Chambers & Trudgill (1980) had suggested that more attention needed to be paid to
linguistic changes as people age, some linguists had begun to compare the speech of those who
move to a new speech community with the speech of more stable members of that community,
to determine how speakers can change.
For example, Payne (1980) studied children of domestic immigrants into King of Prussia,
an edge city outside Philadelphia, and found that while some changes were only acquired by the
youngest children whose local variety was reinforced in the home, some changes were adopted
not just by children, but even by teenagers. More recently, Kerswill (1996) studied children
growing up in ‘new towns’, and Chambers (1992, 1995) and Tagliamonte & Molfenter (2007)
studied children who moved to dialect areas even more distinct from their parents’, finding
parallel results. Feagin (1990) found that an individual with strong motivation could shift
toward a more r-ful norm after adolescence, then return to the older, Southern r-less norm
when needed. Shockey (1984) carried out a panel study of Americans in the UK workforce,
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finding that, to varying extents, the speakers also adapted their /r/ to the UK standard. The
work of Trudgill (1983) cited earlier can also be understood as adaptation of a speaker to a
second dialect.
Similarly, Sankoff (2004, 2006), as mentioned above, took advantage of a British corpus
that provided panel-like speech data for several speakers: a film series by a British filmmaker
Michael Apted, who filmed interviews with 14 7-year-old children in 1963, and has
reinterviewed those who were available every seven years (1970, 1977, 1984…), with the most
recent interviews conducted in 2005, when the participants were nearly fifty years old. These
interviews provided not just time depth, but also evidence of individual variation related to the
participants’ life trajectories. For example, Sankoff (2006) analyzed phonological variation in
the speech of two of the men as they went from ages 7 to 35; one of them was upwardly mobile,
moving from rural youth to Oxford-trained physicist working in the US, while the other began
as middle class, but didn’t make it into a major university and became downwardly mobile.
These are extreme cases, chosen to determine the extent to which people can alter their
phonological systems in adolescence and young adulthood. Two vowels were isolated for the
men: broad a and /U/.
Sankoff found that broad a was stable because it was a salient marker of region
(matching a prediction from Trudgill 1986), and the speakers were both positive about wanting
to retain their local identity. On the other hand, merged-/U/ was adapted to the changing
circumstances of the speakers, by either remaining merged or re-splitting into two distinct
units. Sankoff’s findings can be compared with those of Feagin (1990, 2003), Shockey (1984),
Prince (1988), and Yaeger-Dror (1992, 1993), who found that their adult speakers altered their
phonology (specifically, r-fulness) depending on where they lived, and the degree to which their
sense of identity conformed to the region they grew up in or to the region they moved to. None
of these studies concluded that the adaptation in r-fulness was purely a product of “exemplar
dynamics,” but all felt that both the speakers’ choice of community and their personal identity
were more influential than would be possible if the critical period were operant.
These findings give solid evidence of adaptation past adolescence, especially since such
adaptation has been found for both a simple alteration (the loss or reinsertion of r) and
something more complex (a split into two lexically determined phonological units). This is
particularly the case given Payne’s (1980) finding that lexically determined phonological
differences are quite difficult even for young children to develop—clearly, adults are able to
adapt their linguistic behavior in complicated ways, not just simple, straightforward ones.
4. Conclusions
Whether studies of real-time linguistic changes are carried out with data selectively gathered
from library resources, from publicly available sound files, or with funding for the gathering of
trend or panel corpora to follow up earlier analyses, as Hermann’s (1929) follow-up on
Gauchat’s (1905) findings in Charmey (cf. D’Arcy, this volume), the overall conclusion is clear:
it is necessary to consider the possibility of post-adolescent change when evaluating how any
linguistic change takes place. The studies discussed in this paper testify to the fact that
historical linguistic analysis should attempt to incorporate a component which permits the
comparison of a given speaker at two times so that apparent time evidence can be substantiated
by real-time comparative data, since the evidence now shows that apparent time results are
often ambiguous, since speakers shift linguistically throughout their lifespans. Work collected
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in recent volumes (Nevalainen & Fitzmaurice 2011; Fitzmaurice & Minkova 2008) provides
ample evidence that such studies can offer new insights.
In fact, even the material from Trudgill’s (1988) reanalysis of Norwich, which involved
trend rather than panel data, demonstrated how real time analysis reveals a wealth of
possibilities which the original study had no inkling of. This is particularly important given the
conclusions of Yaeger-Dror (1994, 1997), Boberg (2004), and Sankoff & Blondeau (2007: 582,
emphasis in original): “to the extent that older speakers change in the direction of change in
progress in their adult lives, apparent time UNDERESTIMATES the rate of change”—essentially,
while apparent time results give an approximation of linguistic changes in a community, they
do not give a complete picture of those changes.
The central question for this chapter was to draw attention to the ways in which
historical studies can be enriched by attention to change in real time. The mere fact that
research into language change can use changes in usage between two points in time implies that
scribal variation by a single writer (in a single genre) can be used to investigate linguistic
change. While such evidence has been employed in a few earlier studies (Boyarin 1978, 1979;
Steiner 2007), historical linguists could certainly take greater advantage of the data available.
Of course, when obtaining real-time data, researchers must be sure that the method for
gathering data does not taint the samples (Thibault & Vincent 1990; Gregersen & BarnerRasmussen 2011). It is critical to attend to the social situation when gathering data, since it is
well-known that social situation strongly influences stylistic variation. Many of the panel
studies discussed here took pains to use situations as similar as possible to the initial
interactionbut it always bears repeating that the goal in both trend and panel real-time studies
must be to match rather than “improve on” the initial interaction.
Clearly, in historical studies romantic letters cannot be compared with business
correspondence or political essays (Nevalainen & Fitzmaurice 2011), just as synchronic studies
must isolate political oratory from political debates or news interviews (Kemp & Yaeger-Dror
1991; Yaeger-Dror & Hall-Lew 2002). If there is contamination of the data in an apparent-time
study, that contamination could hopefully have affected all of the data gathered equally, but if
only one time point is contaminated in a real-time study, the data collected at different times is
not actually comparable.
Given that caveat, though, there is certainly a need for study of linguistic changes in real
time, using panels of speakers whenever possible. While studies of variation in linguistic
behavior among speakers of different ages have provided insight into the way communal
linguistic behavior shifts over time, changes made by a community are actually the result of a
large number of individual linguistic (or scribal) choices. A better understanding of such
changes made evident by appropriate comparisons would allow us to improve our study tactics,
and would help us refine our methods so that some of the shortcomings of earlier studies could
be corrected for, providing a more accurate and nuanced picture of linguistic change over time.
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