Sociolinguistic factors predicting sound change in Swiss German

Swiss German dialects have changed substantially over the past few centuries. Previous literature provides ample evidence of sound change. However, most previous studies are limited either in the number of localities or variables, or in the sociolinguistic metadata obtained from participants. In the present contribution we provide a large-scale analysis of sound change, examining ten phonetic variables from 1000 speakers who come from 125 representative localities in German-speaking Switzerland. Factors such as age, mobility, and dialect identity appear to be the driving forces behind sound change, which is further patterned regionally and constrained by between-item variation. We discuss reasons for the sound change observed.