Nonmobile Older Rural Males and Mobile Young Suburban Females in Changing Dialect Landscapes and Regiolects

Contrary to expectations, NORMS (nonmobile older rural males) are not the repository of real dialect. The development of dialects is in constant flux, & the situation within dialects has always been variable. The influence of social characteristics of speakers on their dialect characteristics is not always given, but they may be present in different degrees or not present at all. It has been supposed that this last state of affairs (no influence) should be an artifact of over- or undersampling of speakers of a certain sex, age, or social class. J. Daan (1963) was the first in The Netherlands to present an analysis of the social makeup of the speaker sample of the Amsterdam Dialect Questionnaires, but in dialectology, correlations of such data with speakers' dialect characteristics have been made rather anecdotally on the behavior of persons pooled into groups (the notable exception is Daan & H. Heikens's 1976 sociodialectological study). Correlation of these characteristics on the level of the individual, rare in dialectology, is attempted here; we show that slight over- or undersampling does not necessarily lead to a significant role for the geographical position of dialects at the expense of possible significant social characteristics. On the contrary, the value of significant structural dialect-internal characteristics remains the same. This means that, within & across dialects, variable as they have always been in the distribution of linguistic features, dialects are not necessarily developing into a regiolect. T-deletion data in northeastern Dutch dialects show that middle & higher class speakers, although "contaminated" by the standard language & by a remarkable postadolescent age effect (apparent time), show remarkably stable dialect features in the sense of a geographical dialect. Since the dialect-internal factors on t-deletion embody the effects of historical word structure, the fact that the values of significant structural dialect internal characteristics remain the same (& remain significant) when social factors are added as explanatory variables implies a certain real time stability which makes transmission of the patterns over generations possible. 2 Tables, 3 Figures, 3 Maps, 8 References. Adapted from the source document