Language change across the lifespan: The changing status of a local variant

Abstract Three major studies on pronunciation were conducted in Iceland over a period of 70 years, including collection of real-time data. One subgroup of participants was interviewed as children in the 1940s, again as adults in the 1980s, and once again in the 2010s. Another subgroup was interviewed twice. By reanalysing raw data on participants in the first study the author was able to compare them with subsequent studies and trace individual developments, and thus examine lifespan changes over a long period. This article focuses on 62 participants from the two subgroups (47 people born in 1927–1932, and 15 born in 1963–1970), all from north-eastern Iceland, and a regional variant called ‘hard speech’ ( harðmæli ), i.e., the use of aspirated rather than unaspirated intervocalic plosives, comparing it with another north-eastern variant, so-called ‘voiced pronunciation’ ( raddaður framburður ), i.e., the use of voiced rather than voiceless sonorants before /p,t,k/. This reanalysis of the data of these seminal studies not only corroborates earlier findings that pronunciation can and does change among adult individuals, it also suggests (a) that such lifespan changes are more likely to happen in the first 2–3 decades of adulthood; and (b) that while ‘hard speech’ is fading as a local variant it shows signs of strengthening among individual speakers over their lifetime. This development takes place concurrently with attitudinal changes towards ‘hard speech’, which has come to be perceived as ‘clear pronunciation’.