Fei schee: The social meaning of intensifier use in Swabian

Intensifiers are linguistic devices which provide speakers with the opportunity to impress, persuade, praise, and generally influence the interlocutor’s reception of a message. This real-time study examines intensifiers in Swabian German, across the lifespan of 20 speakers recorded in 1982 and in 2017. The results indicate that women use amplifiers (e.g., so ‘so’, echt ‘really’) more frequently than men, while men use downtoners (e.g., e bissle ‘a bit’) more frequently than women, a trend that changes over the lifespan: as they age, men use amplifiers more frequently and use downtoners less frequently, converging toward the women’s usage. Speakers from Stuttgart exhibit the highest rate of amplification, suggesting that individuals in urban environments may feel the pressure to use linguistic devices that scale up qualities to impress and persuade more frequently than speakers in semi-rural locations. This study reveals how speakers use intensifiers to index different social meanings (i.e., gender identity, sense of place and belonging) as they construct and develop their personae across their lifespans.