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ABSTRACT
Dialect use in Shetland's main town, Lerwick, demonstrates substantial interspeaker variability in the youngest generation, with some young speakers never using dialect features and some using them at rates similar to older generations. Such extreme interspeaker variability may be a harbinger of a complete shift to standardized varieties of English in subsequent generations as was suggested by Dorian in her research on Gaelic‐speaking communities. This paper attempts to examine the extent to which these predictions are accurate, by focussing on a set of features (was/were variation) which began shifting towards standardized English in the middle aged generation. This makes it possible to concretely gauge what the effects of considerable interspeaker variability are on subsequent generations. The separate, yet linked, distribution of the features studied also makes it possible to examine constant rate effects more closely.