Effects of educational and social mobility on language maintenance, language attitudes and language structure: The case of Sele in Carinthia

Abstract

Sele, a village in the Slovene‐speaking minority area of Austria, exemplifies the effects of twentieth‐century mobility on village life and on (socio‐)linguistic structures. In the 1920s it was extremely isolated; in the 1990s it is included in the normal life of central Europe. This paper examines the life styles of the inhabitants of Sele in these two decades, with statistics to demonstrate the enormous changes in work and in marriage patterns, which, with educational changes, reflect the surge in mobility and communication of our century. Also examined are four aspects of the linguistic behaviour of the inhabitants of Sele: their linguistic networks, the relative amounts of use of the four language varieties available to them, the kinds of variation within their dialect and the factors therein involved, and the linguistic vitality of their dialect. Sele represents an excellent example not only of a challenge to the analyst who wishes to analyse all the factors involved in variation and relate them to sociolinguistic parameters, but also of the results of changes in social and educational mobility, which make continued language maintenance a difficult challenge for the inhabitants of Sele.

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