The research focuses on the variation of spoken Slovene of five informants from the Idrija region with a distinctive Cerkno local dialect, who daily or weekly migrate for work or school to the capital, Ljubljana, where they use different strategies of speech behaviour in communication with speakers of other varieties of Slovene.
Sociolinguistic methods and findings that have been primarily developed and used in the Anglo-Saxon environment have been adapted to the Slovene sociolinguistic situation (cf. the works of W. Labov and S. A. Tagliamonte), taking into account comparable sociolinguistic research in other environments (cf. Germany: W. Besch, Norway: B. Mæehlum, The Czech Republic: J. Wilson and Denmark: M. Monka).
Variation of informants’ speech is observed according to different circumstances as well as social and sociopsychological factors. Methodologically, the quantitative analysis of informants’ language variation is combined with qualitative data from interviews about their experiences with language use, language attitudes and the perception of their own language behaviour. With the aim of observing authentic language use and diminishing observer’s paradox, the technique of informants’ full-day self audio recording was used. The research corpus is based on text selection from the whole material, according to different circumstances: time, place, interlocutors, topic of conversation and formality of the situation. Out of a total of approximately 47 hours of recordings, approximately 2.5 hours were selected for the analysis. The central part of the investigation is the analysis of five phonological (three vowel and two consonant) variables. Besides this, attention is paid to some morphological variables and lexicon. The qualitative data were gathered in sociolinguistic interviews and include informants’ sex, age, personal history, the time when they started migrating to the capital, social network and personal characteristics.
The results show that different types of speakers exist and that we can often speak about continuum-like transitions between the dialect and the standard. The informants’ intermediate language varieties do not correspond to the dichotomy between the standard and traditional dialects, which is often too schematized in Slovene linguistics. Different variables show different tendencies and different social and sociopsychological factors prove to be relevant for the explanation of individuals’ language behaviour.
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