ABSTRACT
Fifty years ago, Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog observed that “idiolects do not provide the basis for self-contained or internally consistent grammars”; rather, regularity and coherence, constrained by social factors, is found in the composite grammar of the speech community. Recently, increasing focus has been placed on the role of the individual in ongoing language change and whether individual lifespan trajectories can “speed up” or “slow down” community change. This conundrum precipitates the question as to how well the grammars of individuals and the grammars of a community may cohere or covary and what this portends for our theories of language change. To address this challenge, this chapter examines different measures of sociolectal coherence in Swabian, a variety of Alemannic German which is undergoing rampant dialect levelling and convergence to the standard language. Twenty linguistic variables across different levels of the grammar from 80 Swabian speakers in two different speech communities are examined over a 35-year timespan. The findings reveal that Functional Richness, a method borrowed from ecology for measuring ecosystem processes and resilience to environmental changes by identifying the amount of “niche space” filled by a set of features in a community, is a suitable and illuminating metric for assessing sociolinguistic coherence. The results indicate that younger speakers today are more coherent than older speakers, which is most certainly due to the rampant dialect levelling that has been occurring in Swabian and the almost singular focus on standard German in school.
