1. Language Change at the Intersections of Movement, Economy, and Orientation

Abstract

A growing amount of research on North American English varieties shows that many sociolinguistic variables peaked among the Baby Boomer Generation (born approximately 1946-64).By "peak," we mean that a linguistic phenomenon in one community has reached its point of greatest intensity and is maximally divergent from realizations of that same variable in most other North American communities.Similarly, we also find studies that describe a "cliff" beginning among Generation X (born approximately 1965-82) such that after generations of relative stability, local dialect features are lost.Nesbitt (2021, 359) observes that "the Baby Boomer-Gen X transition appears to be a pivotal transition throughout the country [and] appears to be of great importance to North American English dialects in general."In this volume, we present studies that illuminate the nature of these changes.The eight studies contained here discuss changes in phonological, grammatical, and lexical variation among White Americans, Black Americans, Irish Catholics, and Yats from communities in New York, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and California.More examples can be found in other phenomena, communities, and regions, and we lament that we could not include them all here.However, this volume represents the first themed discussion of such phenomena, and we look forward to further discussion around these topics.We are not proposing that all communities underwent linguistic change in the Baby Boomer to Gen X transition, and we purposely sought out cases that go against that pattern.We feel that including such counterexamples is useful because they circumscribe not the variable context (à la Poplack and Tagliamonte 1989, 60) but rather the predictor context, or help define the range of influence any one predictor variable has on a linguistic variable.They also highlight communities that go against or resist trends in mainstream North American English.It is worth exploring why such communities did or did not change together with many other communities, to deepen our understanding of the kind of language-external factors that drive language change.

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