In empirischen Wissenschaften finden sich implizite oder explizite Annahmen über die Grundgesamtheit und sinnvolle repräsentative Stichproben aus ihr. In der Linguistik sind dies unter anderem Annahmen über Sprecher:innen, d.h. darüber, wer als normal, typisch oder Default angesehen wird. Solche Annahmen werden mittlerweile stärker reflektiert, und in meinem Vortrag erörtere ich einige der Problemfelder. Ich behandele dabei Fragen wie: Wer zählt als Muttersprachler:in? Wem gehört der Dialekt? Welche Sprecher:innen erforschen wir für Grammatikbeschreibung und Sprachverarbeitung? An wem orientiert sich „Bildungssprache“? Welche Art gesellschaftlicher Makrokontexte und geographischer Regionen haben wir primär im Blick? Ich analysiere zugrundeliegende Annahmen dazu, wer zum Kern und wer zur Peripherie zählt, und diskutiere Implikationen für Forschung und Transfer.

You don't need linguistics training to observe that people sometimes change their accent after moving to a new region, adjusting their speech to become more similar to that of the ambient dialect. But for understanding the details of how and why such change happens - which sounds shift and which stay put, what linguistic factors favor or disfavor change, and the social motivations underlying these patterns - the linguist's diverse theoretical and methodological toolkit is a valuable resource. In this talk I will argue that studies of accent change due to mobility (or "second dialect acquisition") can also speak to key questions in sociophonetics and contribute to phonological debates about how words and sounds are represented. I'll also discuss some of the methodological issues that arise in the study of accent change over the lifespan, and ways to address them. To illustrate these points, I will present findings from my work examining the speech of native Torontonians living in New York City and native New Yorkers who have moved to Toronto. I’ll focus specifically on variation and change in these speakers’ vowel systems, and paint a (somewhat paradoxical) picture of phonetically and lexically gradient dialect change occurring against a backdrop of structural stability. Finally, I'll discuss what these findings suggest about phonological representations and change, and avenues for future research.

The focus of the talk is on individuals in Ukraine who, after the Euromaidan of 2013–2014 and the following Russian aggression, decided to change their linguistic practices and switch to speaking Ukrainian in daily life. Particularly, I focus on adult Russian speakers with or without a background in Ukrainian who still need to invest significantly in the language learning. The talk is based on 12-month ethnographic observation of Free Ukrainian Language Courses (FULC) – a volunteer network of Ukrainian language instructors teaching Ukrainian for free in Ukraine. The classroom data come from an FULC centre in Kherson, situated in Kherson region bordering the annexed Crimean Peninsula in the south of Ukraine. I concentrate on the linguistic practices of the FULC instructor and the students in order to reveal their attitudes towards bilingual practices, nonstandard use and syncretic Ukrainian-Russian forms. I argue that the inferences drawn from this research can inform our understanding of the dynamics of linguistic practices in multilingual, conflict-ridden settings, while they also shed light on the effective ways of extending Ukrainian as a second language to Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population at the time of the ongoing war.