Variation and Change in Language Revitalization

The category ‘new speaker’ (NS) has emerged independently in several language‐revitalization settings to refer to individuals who acquire the target language outside of the home. In this chapter we argue that these adult learners offer the opportunity to refine our theorizations on how best to study linguistic and social change in tandem, and we propose a novel approach on which working hypotheses can be tested in this area. In particular, we consider how new speakers can be integrated into variationist research designs. Taking inspiration from adjacent sociolinguistic scholarship, our approach foregrounds the ideological shifts – or mudes following Pujolar and Gonzàlez – and associated changes in language practices that new speakers undergo across the lifespan. We argue that these ideological shifts are best captured by modeling mudes as a discrete social‐psychological variable. In drawing on production data from a case study of variation in Basque direct object marking, we demonstrate that the incorporation of mudes into variation analysis offers a promising avenue for exploring language change under fluctuating societal conditions born of revitalization.