This article is the first to quantify the interindividual effects of different major life events (MLEs) on retrospective perceptions of individual-level linguistic change across the adult lifespan. In this cross-sectional study, 701 German-speaking participants from Austria completed an online survey measuring the extent to which MLEs in the educational, occupational, and personal domain are associated with perceived changes in productive and affective-attitudinal aspects of the sociolinguistic repertoire. Bayesian modeling revealed that events such as beginning a tertiary degree, entry into the workforce, and retirement were perceived to impact participants’ varietal use. Overall, however, affective-attitudinal factors such as dialect identity appear to be more readily susceptible to perceived MLE-related change. These results help pave a new path for variationist agendas that approach lifespan linguistic change not as a result of chronological age, but rather as a phenomenon influenced by individual experiential factors complexly intertwined with the process of aging.

While dialectal variation is often investigated from a geographical angle, there exists substantial variation both within the community and individual. The aim of the present article is to investigate the extent to which spatial, occupational, and age-related factors are associated with the diversity of linguistic variants reported per informant at a given locality. Drawing on colloquial language data from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache ‘Atlas of Colloquial German,’ we found that informants from southeastern Germany and Austria reported familiarity with more variants. Moreover, we multifactorially operationalize occupational complexity, a variable that can capture the effects of different communicative, technical, and physical skills required in a job (via the Dictionary of Occupational Titles). Bayesian multilevel modeling revealed that informants in occupations involving physical precision work and communicative complexity reported less familiarity with variants, and that younger informants were familiar with a wider range of variants.

Despite the attention (ing) has received in variationist literature, it is comparatively understudied in the North West of England where it holds something of a unique sociolinguistic profile. Variation in this region is between three competing forms: [ɪŋɡ] appears alongside the usual [ɪn]/[ɪŋ] variants. Based on sociolinguistic interviews with 32 speakers from this region, this study investigates whether [ɪŋɡ] replaces [ɪŋ] as the local standard or exists alongside it to fulfill a different sociolinguistic role. Results suggest that [ɪŋ] is maintained as the standard variant, and that [ɪŋɡ] occupies its own functional space as a feature of emphatic and hyper-articulate speech, appearing almost exclusively before pause. (ing) also shows no sensitivity to part of speech, despite the strength of this effect in other varieties of English. These results are discussed in the context of broader questions regarding the underlying representation of this variation, specifically its allophonic or allomorphic nature.

Language variation is demonstrably affected by accumulated experiences reflecting the consequences of the contexts in which words are most frequently used. Yet, these contextual frequency effects are seldom explored in children’s speech. This study uses a corpus-based approach to investigate how 29 Spanish-speaking children, aged 5–15, realize word-initial Spanish /d/ as a function of accumulated experiences with /d/-initial words in articulatory contexts that promote reduction. Contextual frequency effects are also examined in 12 Spanish-speaking adults from the children’s community. Cumulative experience is estimated as the form’s frequency of occurrence in a specific context that promotes a specific variant. Results reveal contextual frequency effects in both the child and adult data. Moreover, the extent of the contextual frequency effect is comparable across generations.

Local orientation has been shown to influence speakers’ participation in local dialect norms and ongoing sound changes since the beginning of modern sociolinguistics (e.g., Labov, 1963). I argue here that local orientation is best understood as an orientation to the ideological imagined place, rather than to the actual physical hometown itself. Analysis of the effect of orientation to the imagined Philadelphia shows that speakers’ personal orientation impacts their adoption of an ongoing change. This change is best understood when orientation is considered alongside a major structural influence on young speakers—secondary school attendance—using a bipartite network analysis. The sound change under investigation, a change in the conditioning of a split in /æ/, is highly abstract and complex, making it an unlikely candidate for overt or intentional identity work. Nevertheless, a regression analysis finds strong effects of both structural influences and personal orientation on speakers’ advancement in this abstract change.