Language Change From Adolescence to Adulthood

Language Change from Adolescence to Adulthood fills a critical need for more sociolinguistic panel studies by presenting an in-depth examination of 40 individuals, addressing key questions regarding the impact of social factors on post-adolescent language change. Suzanne Evans Wagner’s analysis offers important insights into how the rate of community language change intersects with individual linguistic trajectories, advancing our understanding of the lability of language use over the lifespan.

Wagner’s study follows a cohort of 40 young women as they pass from high school to college to early adulthood. Addressing these women’s use of phonetic and discourse-pragmatic variables, Wagner shows that many aspects of their sociolinguistic repertoire exhibit post-adolescent modification, depending on a range of macro- and micro-social factor, including socioeconomic background, educational attainment, and orientation to the local community. This foundational study lays the groundwork for a deeper understanding into the nature of language change and will appeal to variationist sociolinguists, historical sociolinguists, ethnographic sociolinguists, sociophoneticians, and qualitative researchers interested in the role of the individual in community variation and community change.