Does the linguistic market explain sociolinguistic variation in spoken Swiss Standard German?

Büchler, Andrin; Bülow, Lars; Britain, David (14 July 2022). Does the linguistic market explain sociolinguistic variation in spoken Swiss Standard German? (Unpublished). In: Sociolinguistics Symposium 24. Ghent. 13.–16.07.2022.

Following the work of Bourdieu/Boltanski (1975), Sankoff/Laberge (1978) empirically operationalised the idea of the linguistic market and successfully applied it to the sociolinguistic situation of Montreal. The index used for the linguistic market is based on “how speakers’ economic activity, taken in its widest sense, requires, or is necessarily associated with, competence in the legitimized language (or standard, elite, educated, etc., language)” (Sankoff/Laberge 1978: 239). Although Sankoff et al. (1989) show that their index better explains the linguistic variation found in Montreal than traditional sociolinguistic factors, there has been little empirical work testing the significance of the concept in other settings.
This paper aims to empirically apply the linguistic market concept to the sociolinguistic situation of German-speaking Switzerland. For this, a linguistic market index is generated from likert-scaled data on language attitudes and assessment. This index is tested to explain variation in spoken Swiss Standard German against traditional sociolinguistic factors such as level of education, gender, attention to speech and intra-linguistic factors, which have proven to be decisive in recent variationist studies (Bülow et al. 2021; Büchler et al. accepted).
Data are based on sociolinguistic interviews including informal conversations as well as reading and translation tasks from 16 adults from Biel in North-West Switzerland, ranging in age from 19 to 40. We tested four phonetic-phonological variables, (k), (ç), (aː) and (ɛ/ɛː), which are well-attested to vary both at the level of the Swiss German speech community and also at the level of individual speakers within the community (cf. Hove 2002; Christen et al. 2010).
Mixed Effects Models show that the linguistic market index is a more robust predictor than the other predictors tested (e.g., gender, attention to speech). It is the only predictor whose relative variable importance (RVI) proved to be equally high for each of the phonetic-phonological variables respectively.

References
Bourdieu, Pierre/Boltanski, Luc (1975): « Le fétichisme de la langue ». Actes de la recherche
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Büchler, Andrin/Bülow, Lars/Rawyler, Nicolai (accepted): „Welchen Einfluss nimmt der Bildungsgrad auf die k-Affrizierung im Schweizer Standard?“. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik.
Bülow, Lars/Büchler, Andrin/Rawyler, Nicolai/Schneider, Christa/Britain, David (2021): “Linguistic, social, and individual factors constraining variation in spoken Swiss Standard German”. In: Werth, Alexander/Bülow, Lars/Pfenninger, Simone E./Schiegg, Markus (eds.): Intra-individual variation in language. Berlin/Boston, Mouton de Gruyter: 127–173. (= Trends in Linguistics 363).
Christen, Helen/Guntern, Manuela/Hove, Ingrid/Petkova, Marina (2010): Hochdeutsch in aller Munde: Eine empirische Untersuchung zur gesprochenen Standardsprache in der Deutschschweiz. Stuttgart: Steiner.
Hove, Ingrid (2002): Die Aussprache der Standardsprache in der deutschen Schweiz. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Sankoff, David/Laberge, Suzanne (1978): “The linguistic market and the statistical explanation of variability”. In: Sankoff, David (ed.): Linguistic variation. Models and methods. New York/San Francisco/London, Academic Press: 239–250.
Sankoff, David/Cedergren, Henrietta J./Kemp, William/Thibault, Pierre/Vincent, Diane (1989): “Montreal French: Language, Class, and Ideology”. In: Fasold, Ralph W./Schiffrin, Deborah (eds.): Language Change and Variation. Amsterdam, Benjamins: 107–118.

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