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Although personality-related factors play a crucial role in sociolinguistics as conceivable sources of language variation and change, there is insufficient quantitative evidence on such relationships. Using a large and balanced sample (n = 1000), this study investigated effects of personality traits on the use of a Swiss German plural marker in its early stages of diffusion. Besides age and region, conscientiousness and extraversion emerged as the most important predictors: less conscientious and, to a certain extent, more extraverted speakers were more likely to contribute to the diffusion of the morphological innovations under investigation. Based on our results, we argue that less conscientious speakers might monitor their own speech and that of others less closely, thus adopting innovations earlier, whereas extraverted speakers may act as successful brokers in transmitting innovations from one social group to another.

This paper investigates the occurrence of inflected predicative adjectives, an optional yet distinguishing feature of German dialects spoken in southern Switzerland. We provide an in-depth analysis of the patterns of change of this morphosyntactic marker with a particular focus on extralinguistic factors. Historical records from 1950 were compared to contemporary data collected from 192 speakers across 49 localities in 2020–21. Our results corroborate previous reports indicating a substantial, real-time decline in inflected forms. Logistic mixed-effects modeling suggests that the inflection of predicative adjectives occurs more frequently among speakers who report tight social networks, have a strong local dialect identity, and regularly use one or more Romance languages. These findings support the claim that tight social networks and local dialect identity construction may lead to the preservation of conservative grammatical forms. Additionally, the effect of Romance languages highlights the role of transfer phenomena induced by language contact.

Phonetik und Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum, Phonetik und Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum

Poster presented at the Bern Data Science Day 2022

Increased geographical mobility motivates dialectologists to consider the exposure of survey participants to linguistic variation. Changing mobility patterns (e.g. longer-distance commuting; easier relocation to distant places for work, study or marriage) have caused linguistic connections to become much more diverse, contributing to an acceleration of dialect change. To assess the impact of individual mobility on this change, we propose the Linguistic Mobility Index (LMI) framework, which estimates long-term exposure to dialectal variation based on episodes of linguistic biography. An LMI of a survey participant comprises combinations of influencing factors, such as dialects of parents, long-term partners, places lived, place of work and education. The linguistic effects of these factors are represented by linguistic distances to the survey participant in question, and the effects are cumulated into an LMI in a weighted manner, according to the relationship the factor embodies and the intensity of the participant’s exposure to the factor. LMI is conceptualised and evaluated based on 500 speakers from 125 localities in the Swiss German Dialects Across Time and Space (SDATS) corpus. Four LMI prototypes are constructed, employing different theoretical considerations and combinations of influencing factors to simulate the availability of metadata in other studies, thereby assessing the generalisability of the framework. Using mixed-effects modelling, we evaluate the utility of the LMI prototypes as predictors of dialect change between historic and contemporary linguistic data of Swiss German. The LMI prototypes successfully show that higher exposure to dialectal variation contributes to more dialect change and that its effect is stronger than some of those sociodemographic variables often tested for similar effects (e.g. sex and educational background). The success of the four prototypes justifies the potential implementation of the LMI framework in other studies, including those with a limited amount of metadata, for which we also provide further guidance in the contribution.

www.sdats.ch http://p3.snf.ch/project-181090