Thirty Years Later: Real-Time Change and Stability in Attitudes towards the Dialect in Shetland

Abstract

A strand of recent sociolinguistic research has focused on how attitudes towards language varieties are intrinsically linked with processes of language shift and language change: some have examined the perception of specific features (Buchstaller 2006; Campbell-Kibler 2007, 2008, 2009; Labov, Ash, Ravindranath, Weldon, Baranowski and Nagy 2011), while others have concentrated on attitudes towards whole dialects or languages (Coupland and Bishop 2007; Garrett 2010; Lippi-Green 2011). Much of this research comes precisely when a new feature is gaining ground or when a dialect or language is in the process of shift, and indeed, attitudes can be good predictors of linguistic shift related to age, gender, social class and other external factors. How can we be completely sure, however, that the attitudes are genuinely precursors to actual shift if we do not have concrete knowledge about attitudes in the period before the change? Attitude shifts may merely happen to run parallel to the linguistic changes and not be related to them. To gauge whether attitudes influence linguistic shift, real-time change in attitudes needs to be examined where possible, alongside research on attitudes at a single point in time. While sociolinguistic research has conclusively demonstrated that the apparent-time construct is appropriate to examine language change in many contexts (Bailey 2002), it has not been clarified whether this can be directly transferred to change in linguistic attitudes.KeywordsLanguage ShiftTense MorphemeLinguistic ChangeLinguistic SituationAmerican SpeechThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.