Variation in an Austrian winegrower’s nineteenth-century chronicle

While interest in intraindividual variation has grown in recent sociolinguistic research, relatively few studies tackle this type of variation from a historical perspective. This chapter expands on available approaches by focusing on a text type that is rarely studied in historical sociolinguistic research, namely, personal chronicles. Three linguistic variables (e-apocope in feminine nouns, e-apocope in plural nouns, and ge-aphaeresis in participles) in a handwritten, 19th-century chronicle by an Austrian winegrower are analysed with respect to sociolinguistic variationist patterns. These patterns of variation are contextualised with the wider norms of usage at the time as evidenced in printed texts, in which Upper German forms were typically avoided earlier. The results from the statistical analyses show that, apart from lexically conditioned variation, intraindividual differences in the chronicle are found primarily based on discourse mode, pointing to stylistic variation. Intralinguistic factors, by contrast, are relevant to a lesser extent.