Steiner, Carina (2023). Language Variation and Change in German-Speaking Switzerland: Spatial, Social, and Individual Factors. (Dissertation, University of Zurich, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)

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Research on language variation and change is a long-standing tradition in German-speaking Switzerland, with previous studies focusing mostly on the areal distribution of linguistic phenomena. This thesis builds and expands on these perspectives by shedding light on under-researched sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic dimensions of synchronic and diachronic variation in Swiss German. The thesis is embedded in the project titled Swiss German Dialects Across Time and Space (SDATS), which represents the first large-scale study on Swiss German since the 1950s. Between 2020 and 2021, over 300 variables covering all linguistic levels, as well as extensive metadata, were collected from a total of 1,000 speakers from 125 localities. Based on the SDATS data, four quantitative investigations were carried out, focusing on spatial, social, and individual factors related to grammatical and phonetic change. In accordance with prior work, the results revealed change in both real and apparent time, highlighting in particular north–south contrasts with the alpine regions consistently showing the least change. In addition, the statistical modeling suggested that besides a more sophisticated examination of educational effects, the inclusion of language attitudes and use, as well as personality factors, may contribute substantially to the explanation of observed linguistic patterns. For instance, conscientious and introverted speakers were found to be less likely to adopt innovations, while positive attitudes and increased use of the standard language favored transfer phenomena between dialect and standard. Further research will be needed on mobility and social networks, which could only be investigated to a limited extent in this thesis. With regard to future work, combining quantitative and qualitative perspectives on language identities and practices in this special diglossic situation seems a promising approach for gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the complex interplay between social, situational, and speaker-individual factors in language variation and change.

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