ABSTRACT
One useful feature of panel studies is that they can offer insights into real-time changes not only in the community represented by the panel as a whole, but also in each individual member of the panel. This study builds on previous work (Bowie 2005, 2015) by using an archive of publicly broadcast sermons containing the same speakers over several decades to investigate this relationship between community and individual change. The 12 speakers in the archive who were both from the area where the sermons were delivered and appeared at least five times over a period of at least 20 years were analyzed with respect to variation in production of initial (wh) and the vowels of the Western Vowel System. Taken as a whole, these speakers show general stability, with a slight tendency toward the direction of change in the wider community (parallelling Nahkola and Saanilahti 2004); however, this seeming stability is actually an artefact of the grouped results masking significant inter- and intraindividual variation among individuals (paralleling Sankoff and Blondeau 2007). This underscores the need to analyze panels as both groups and as individuals in order to get a full picture of changes in progress.
