Terms of Address: A Contrastive Investigation of Ongoing Changes in British, American and Indian English and in German

Abstract Address terms are closely related to the conceptualisation of hierarchical relations in a speech community, so, since – at least Western societies tendencies towards flattening hierarchies have been noted (cf. Mair, 2006), we expect changes this domain. Some evidence has produced for German, American and British English, but empirical insights on address choice Indian English lacking date. As it tends be conservative variety e.g. Collins, 2012), might resistance change. The study makes novel use discourse completion tasks investigate ongoing change using an ‘apparent-time’ approach. Our findings support view as changing most clearly informalisation, visible increasing informal attention getters ( hey! ). However, recent is otherwise not pronounced expected actually absent regarding pronoun German.