Individual Variation Across the Lifespan (IVaL)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Beat Siebenhaar
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 549020991

The project offers a) as a panel study, an insight into the language variation of 13 individuals over their lifespan, for which hardly any studies are yet available for German, b) Apparent time studies at several points in time, each with approx. 100 participants, c) a trend study comparing the points in time, d) The combination of the three methodological approaches provides an empirical basis for the further development of theories of language change and language dynamics. While language change in speech communities has been studied intensively, little is known about the language variation of individuals over a longer period of time. Long-term corpora are needed in order to investigate the relationships between changes in the speech community and in individuals. Our project refers to the zoo docusoap "Elefant, Tiger & Co.", which accompanies the staff of Leipzig Zoo at work and has been broadcast weekly on MDR since 2003. Individual employees have been involved since the start of the program and are regularly present. This offers an excellent opportunity for a long-term study of non-professional speakers with similar linguistic backgrounds in comparable situations in their everyday working routines. The language situation in East Central Germany is characterized by a strong reduction of dialect and at the same time a relatively large distance to the standard. This distance is reflected in the pronunciation as the preservation of standard-divergent forms (Fleisch for 'meat', Boom for 'tree'), although some (ooch for 'also') are strongly lexicalized, and a specific articulation basis (tendency towards centralization, coronalization, etc.). There are also morphological and syntactic peculiarities with regional anchoring (schwa epithesis with syllabic -n in the final sound: machne ...). The relatively narrow range of linguistic variation means that the situation has less influence on the language than in other regions. The range of variation therefore appears less structured, but this fluidity makes it complex. By analyzing individuals in a number of comparable situations over several years, it is possible to take a differentiated picture of the change in the variation spectrum, which previous apparent-time studies have not been able to show. For German, only a few real-time panel studies are available. In addition to indications of situation-specific behavior and short-term accommodation (microsynchronization), aspects of long-term accommodation (mesosynchronization), which is carried out in the same way by several speakers, can therefore be expected to indicate a changing awareness of norms (macrosynchronization). In addition to the examination of the 13 individuals, all speakers of the program are examined at several points in time, which allows to trace the social development in parallel to the individual development in an apparent-time trend study.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants