ABSTRACT
The dialectical changes seen across the course of individual lives are typically thought to reflect the attritional influence of standard languages on native dialects. However, the distributional properties of natural languages, which guarantee that lexical knowledge continuously increases across the lifespan, suggest these changes might simply reflect the broadening and diversification of individual vocabularies, not the loss of dialect itself. Consistent with this proposal, speech analyses from 20 speakers of the southwestern German dialect Swabian, recorded in 1982 and again in 2017, reveal that across their lifetimes, these speakers did not suffer a significant loss of dialect, but rather gained a vast amount of non-dialectal vocabulary, a pattern of change that was promoted or constrained by local orientation and personal identity. The analyses show that dialect words were actually used with similar frequencies across the two recording periods, indicating that speakers’ dialectal knowledge remains largely intact, while in the later recordings low-frequency words from the standard language were used at increased rates, reflecting gains in non-dialectal vocabulary across the lifespan. These results suggest an alternative account of the changes in individual speech patterns in which the changes observed in lexical choice across the lifespan primarily reflect the increased influence of later acquired, usually non-dialect, lexical knowledge, and not necessarily the “loss” of dialect itself.
