Children’s Linguistic Repertoires Across Dialect and Standard Speech: Mirroring Input or Co-constructing Sociolinguistic Identities?

Abstract

The present study analyses 3-to 6-year-old children's dialect-standard repertoires in an Austrian-Bavarian sociolinguistic setting and investigates how far individual repertoires can be explained by input and sociodemographic factors. Adults' linguistic repertoires in the area typically comprise a certain spectrum on the dialect-standard continuum but individual acquisition processes have hardly been studied yet. We collected language data from 49 children in five different communicative interactions each and analyzed the repertoire each child exhibits. The majority of children could be shown to have a bi-varietal repertoire at their disposal, but there were substantial numbers of children who exhibited either standard-only or dialect-only repertoires. We then examined the relationships between a child's repertoire and potentially relevant input and sociodemographic variables. While language variety use in the home and maternal education did not prove significant predictors of children's repertoires, gender, age, location, bilingualism and frequency of being read to did.

Sociolinguistic competence and varietal repertoires in a second language: A study on addressee‐dependent varietal behavior using virtual reality

“…Once the speech data had been segmented, they were manually transcribed quasi-orthographically with the aim of capturing any features that distinguished standard German, dialect, and mixture speech. Each clausal unit in the present corpus was then categorized following similar schemes as in Ender (2021Ender ( , 2022 and Kaiser (2019Kaiser ( , 2022 Isolated word productions that, due to their stark deviation from a possible target-like form, could not be classified as one of the categories discussed above, or otherwise were not perceptually discernible in the recordings, were not taken into account during the categorization process and were not analyzed further. Clausal units comprising exclusively ambiguous word realizations were also excluded from further analysis.…”

“…Our decision not to balance the gender of the interlocutors in the VR tasks was made out of deference to participants, specifically to avoid lengthening the VR task and thus to minimize participant fatigue and dropout. 6 In line with previous variationist work in the Austro-Bavarian context (e.g., Bülow & Vergeiner, 2021;Kaiser, 2019Kaiser, , 2022Vergeiner, 2020Vergeiner, , 2021, we refrain from employing acoustic analyses of the respective variables, primarily because of the clear perceptual salience of standard German versus Austro-Bavarian dialect features. With this in mind, however, our claims regarding (non)accommodation by L2 learners of German concern chiefly the level of sound.…”

“…Austria is a German‐speaking country whose pattern of standard German and dialect use has been conceptualized as a dialect–standard continuum, implying that there is no “clear‐cut distinction between two varieties in use but that a range of speech forms ‘in‐between’ is composed of variable proportions of standard and dialect forms” (Kaiser, 2022, p. 45). These language varieties coexist in everyday life.…”

“…Austro‐Bavarian dialect1 varieties are characterized by their regional use and areal association and are often considered “an intimate form of language” spoken “in intimate circles among acquaintances and persons of perceived equal rank” (Wiesinger, 1990, p. 222, our translation). For a (nonexhaustive) list of features of Austro‐Bavarian dialects, see Kaiser (2022). Conversely, (Austrian) standard German is the prototypical language of instruction as well as the language of official and public addresses and discussions on various occasions; moreover, it is used when the conversation partner is a stranger or regionally unfamiliar and/or socially higher‐ranking (Steinegger, 1998).…”

The Icing on the Cake. Or Is it Frosting? The Influence of Group Membership on Children's Lexical Choices

“…The traditional sociolinguistic view, in fact, was that younger children were largely monostylistic, and did not vary their language based on context (Labov, 1964). While some work has examined children's acquisition of community/group patterns of sociolinguistic variation (see Kaiser, 2022 and Nardy, Chevrot, & Barbu, 2013 for recent reviews), most sociolinguistic research on how young people use language in real‐time to index and negotiate identity has focused on adolescents (e.g., Bucholtz, 1999; Eckert, 1989; but see Lake, 2022; Mooney, 2020). In the current study, we examined whether children can spontaneously adapt their language on the fly in response to the language used by children in their social groups.…”