ABSTRACT
This chapter considers whether the vowel-shifts of the various Germanic languages might have had a sociolinguistic aspect. Lass does well to remind us that discussion based solely on standard forms of English and German needs to be supplemented by consideration of regional variations, and his account of vowel-shifts in modern English and German dialects throws great light on the whole process. As Barbara Strang pointed out, the urbanisation of society plays a central role in language-development, but it is by no means clear that the diphthongisation of high vowels is a case in point. One notes, for example, that the evidence of Scandinavian languages points in the reverse direction, for there the diphthongisation of high vowels is found only in the dialects of rural areas and remote islands. The foregoing notes may appear disappointingly inconclusive, but the author concern is to point out some of the difficulties in the way of systematic generalisations about vowel-shifting.
