Language change and a bilingual’s background: Sociolinguistic variation in Welsh possessive constructions

An innovative Welsh possessive construction (e.g. cath fi ‘my cat’ as opposed to traditional constructions like fy nghath and fy nghath i ‘my cat’) has been previously identified (e.g. Davies 2016) as increasing in frequency diachronically. This paper presents a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis (using Rbrul [Johnson 2009]) of speech data of Welsh-English bilinguals, to identify the factors which govern this change. The results indicate that several factors govern a speaker’s use of the innovative possessive, including age, gender, the order in which they acquired their languages, Welsh proficiency, level of formal education, and language attitudes. The results indicate that Welsh speakers who have high Welsh proficiency but more social exposure to English are the most likely to innovate. It is argued that grammatical change in a minority language situation is at least partly driven by factors such as the degree of exposure to both the minority and majority language a speaker has.