Social Variation in Germanic

Abstract

The spread of Germanic-speaking people and their language(s) has been extraordinarily expansive and extensive and has produced variation under multifarious socio-historical conditions—first as “dialect continua” in Western and Northern Europe, later as “language mixing” of many kinds under colonial situations, and, in the early 21st century, as “urban youth styles” in multicultural or multilinguistic parts of bigger cities. Basically, the social conditions include relationships of domination and subordination at three social levels—macro, meso, and micro—and across three types of space—geographic, social, and situational. Spread happens with contact between speakers. This contact is always social (at all levels and in all spaces) and has an objective aspect (social roles and patterns of communication) and a subjective aspect (language-related ideologies). The pivotal question in this picture is why language speakers in interactional contact vary (and potentially change) their language. What is the driving force in language variation (and change)? Are the processes of variation (and potentially change) automatic/mechanic by nature, or are they sociopsychological/ideological? Of course, scholars working in the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics (now 60-plus years old) have not all related to the various ingredients of the preceding picture in the same way and with the same research interests, so the gamut of questions asked and answers given is broad.