This paper investigates variation in the realization of the happy vowel in Manchester, England, that is, the final vowel in happy, baby, etc., which is often described as extremely lax. It is based on the acoustic analysis of 109 speakers, stratified for age, gender, social class, and ethnicity. The vowel is a rarely reported case of a stable vocalic variable, with no change in apparent time but with clear conditioning by social class (with higher social classes having tenser vowels) and by ethnicity. Style-shifting is minimal, statistically insignificant, and appears to result from durational effects; we conclude that the variable lies largely below speakers' conscious awareness within the speech community. We explore the long-standing Labovian hypothesis that internal linguistic constraints operate independently of social factors and find that the results largely support this hypothesis for the happy vowel. This suggests a shared underlying system despite social differentiation in overall vowel realization.
The process of new-dialect formation occurs when speakers of mutually intelligible varieties come into contact and create a new dialect. In this paper, I show that the process of new-dialect formation is underway in South Florida, even though the dialects coming into contact are themselves mostly contact varieties spoken by bilinguals, language learners, and the descendants thereof. This paper examines multiple vocalic variables used by 11- to 13-year-olds to explore the high variability and dialect leveling characteristic of stage two new-dialect formation. Imposition and other direct contact effects are evident within the speech of some bilingual participants, but similar patterns within the speech of monolingual English-speaking participants point to high interspeaker variability. Policing of marked features points to the direction in which leveling may shape this emerging dialect.
In this study, we explored the social predictors of an ongoing sound change in the Twi Advanced Tongue Root harmony system by acoustically examining production variation in a sample of 105 speakers representing urban and traditional localities in Ghana. In the urban locality, the change was evident in all age-groups and near completion in the youngest generation. In the traditional locality, by contrast, the change was evident only in some younger speakers. The effect of gender differed between localities: urban men were more advanced in the change than urban women, whereas traditional speakers showing the change were predominantly women. By reflecting the gender dynamics of societal engagement and contact in Ghana, these findings highlight the importance of local social context for the manifestation of variation and the unique insights of non-Western communities for sociolinguistic theory.
Recent variationist research indicates that grammatical intra-speaker variation (or: optionality) is unproblematic in speech production. Optionality contexts do not coincide with dysfluencies. In this study, we ask a theoretically significant follow-up question about optionality contexts that strongly cue grammatical variant choice: are optionality contexts in which all variants are probabilistically equally likely more problematic than those that strongly cue choice of grammatical variant? After all, unbiased (un-cued or freer) choices are sometimes theorized as being more difficult than biased (cued) ones. We empirically analyzed a subset of the SWITCHBOARD corpus of spoken American English on a turn-by-turn basis. The dataset covers 7,295 conversational turns containing 7,001 optionality contexts (spread over 20 grammatical alternation types), 2,970 filled pauses, and 41,297 unfilled pauses. Contrary to claims in the literature, weak probabilistic cueing does not trigger more production difficulties than strong probabilistic cueing. Unpredictable grammatical choices are not harder than predictable grammatical choices.
Social salience, the association of a social category with linguistic variables, has been hypothesized to be an important driver of language change. This hypothesis has not been rigorously tested due to the lack of a reliable measure of social salience. In this paper, we present Salience Categorization Test (Sali-CAT), a new approach to measuring the association of word variants with social categories across multiple lexical variables. The approach includes a customized experimental paradigm (three alternative forced choice) and a statistical method to establish the baseline Salience Ratio (Sali-RAT) score for word variants that do not have a bias in usage with respect to the social categories. We demonstrate the approach by testing the association of multiple variables with different generations of speakers in the Gurindji speech community.
This paper examines subject expression in heritage Vietnamese, focusing on its variation in a diasporic, cross-generational context, using corpus data from 45 speakers in Canberra, Australia. While subject expression has been widely studied in other languages, little is known about its use in languages like Vietnamese, which has an "open-class" pronominal system. Results show that although the rates of unexpressed subjects remain stable, the linguistic conditions underlying this variable have undergone change: first-generation speakers are least likely to drop second-person subjects, while second-generation speakers are least likely to drop first-person subjects. Both patterns contradict expectations given the pragmatic constraints of pro-drop in Vietnamese. We further interpret this as potentially a form of community bricolage to re-establish a more equal cross-generational relationship in a diaspora setting. Ultimately, we present a case of pragmatic change driving grammatical choices, thereby also highlighting that contrary to the traditional description, Vietnamese subject expression is perhaps not so "radical" after all.
In this paper, we advocate for the analysis of lexical variation being central to variationist sociolinguistics. We demonstrate that lexical variation is systematic and argue that this systematicity must be accounted for by a comprehensive variationist theory that explains the general causes and mechanisms of language variation and change. We present three empirical studies, which focus on lexical variation in Anglo-Cornish, British Sign Language, and online American English. These studies differ greatly in terms of their methods and results, but each reaffirms that lexis can be studied rigorously and informatively within the variationist paradigm, extending our understanding of language variation and change.
This study examines the future temporal reference (FTR) system among Francophones and Anglophones speaking English in Kapuskasing, Ontario. Previous studies have shown that in Laurentian French, the go future is the preferred variant, and the strongest determinant of variant choice is polarity: negatives strongly favor the inflected future. In Canadian English, the go future has no polarity effect and there is robust variation with will, highlighting a key contrast in the underlying constraints between the French and English FTR systems. The results show that while older Anglophones pattern in tandem with known studies of English, Francophones, as well as young Anglophones, exhibit the polarity contrast of the French system, even though they are speaking English. We suggest that these results may stem from social alignment between Francophones and Anglophones driven by increasing linguistic and social symmetry in the community, as well as increasing positive affect toward French in Kapuskasing.
This study uses data from the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe to compare the acoustic correlates of the length contrast in the peripheral vowels of two regions within the Central Yiddish dialect area: central Poland, considered the more conservative variety, and the Transcarpathian Unterland, hypothesized to have diverged from Polish Yiddish in the prewar period. Findings reveal smaller duration differences in [i:] versus [i] and [a:] versus [a] among Unterland speakers compared to speakers from Poland, with a gender effect in the Unterland showing smaller duration distinctions among women. The duration difference in [u:] versus [u] is significantly smaller than the other vowel pairs in both regions, likely reflecting its ambiguous phonemic status. Vowel quality shows no systematic differences between the two regions. The findings point to the possible influence of population mobility, dialect mixing, geopolitics, and multilingualism on vowel systems.
For seven years in a row (2016 through 2022), we carried out a project with two goals. One was to train undergraduate students in sociolinguistic interviewing; the other was to catch change among English intensifiers. We expected to find an innovative variant, maybe either so or super. However, the incoming form we identify is very. We propose that, after a long decline, very became unusual enough to gain novelty value and be available for recycling. This surprising finding emerges clearly from our fine-grained, real-time data across two registers (speech and instant messaging) despite dozens of different student interviewers and two years of pandemic conditions. The cohesive patterns attest to the fundamental orderliness of language, even in phenomena such as English intensifiers that are characterized by constant, rapid change.
In the wealth of literature on ethnic variation, ethnicity is often considered independently of other social characteristics. However, prioritizing ethnicity in this way risks overlooking the potential impact of other social factors. In this study, we demonstrate an intersection between ethnicity and social class based on a sociolinguistic corpus of Australian English, representing some of the country's largest ethnic groups (Australians of Anglo-Celtic, Italian, Greek, and Chinese backgrounds), stratified according to age, gender, and social class. Rather than beginning with the social groupings, we first identify linguistic groupings to then consider how these groupings align with social dimensions. Cluster analyses of speaker random intercepts derived from independent regression analyses of 10 linguistic variables in recordings from 159 speakers reveal primary divisions for age, reflecting change over time, and secondary divisions for ethnicity in conjunction with social class, highlighting the interconnected nature of these social dimensions in linguistic variation.
Recent research into vowel covariation has suggested that speakers can be identified as leaders or laggers in multiple ongoing sound changes. What remains unclear is how stable a speaker's patterns of covariation are over time and whether these leaders and laggers of sound changes remain leaders and laggers over time. We employ corpus data from 51 New Zealand English (NZE) speakers who were recorded at two time-points (eight years apart) and explore covariation between 10 monophthongs using principal component analysis (PCA). The results indicate significant stability across the time-points in two unique vowel clusters, suggesting that speakers' covariation position within their community remains stable over time. The overall covariation patterns also replicate patterns previously observed in a different corpus of NZE, indicating that patterns of vowel covariation observed with PCA can be stable and replicable across multiple corpora.
This study investigates how children aged 4 to 12 years participate in /u/-fronting, a phonetically conditioned change in Ontario English in which the high back vowel /u/ is initially more fronted after coronal consonants than in other contexts. A picture naming task was used to elicit vowel tokens from children and their parents, and F1 and F2 measurements were extracted using FAVE . Children in all three age groups (4-6, 7-9, 10-12 years) were found to have significantly higher F2 values for /u/ (indicating more fronting) than adults in the non-coronal environment. This pattern does not appear to follow the predicted pattern of incrementation of sound change by older children. Instead, the findings may reflect overgeneralization of /u/-fronting, with young children extending the change to a new phonetic context during acquisition, or an earlier start to the incrementation of this variable in this population.
The present paper investigates a constructional alternation currently under development in Mozambican Portuguese, arising from the constructionalization of a new passive construction (Recipient passives) alongside its standard counterpart (Theme passives). We argue that beyond the influence of the Bantu substrate that led to the emergence of the innovative variant, variation is conceptually and pragmatically motivated and involves restructuring in accordance with the structural constraints of Portuguese. We show how the alternation proves sensitive to a set of linguistic factors, the most prominent of which are related to information structure and differences in perspectivization, or construal . By adopting a sociocognitive view of language and a network view of grammar, we aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of restructuration and indigenization processes taking place in postcolonial varieties of pluricentric languages in the sequence of their nativization.
This cross-dialectal diachronic study focuses on actualization—the gradual mapping out of structural innovations across linguistic environments—and asks: to what extent can the route by which actualization unfolds be explained by appealing to common cognitive constraints, and to what extent are pathways of actualization shaped by community-specific patterns in language use? I analyze real-time syntactic change in Spanish oblique relative clauses (ORCs), which are undergoing an enhancive change towards increasing use of antecedent-agreeing definite articles (e.g., la casa en [la] que nací ‘the house in which I was born’). Over 8,000 occurrences of ORCs were compiled from three Latin American varieties. A Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression analysis shows that various constraints representing the cognitive accessibility of the antecedent influence actualization similarly across varieties. The discussion addresses the cognitive realism of historical corpus data and formulates testable predictions that present profitable lines of inquiry in future cognitively oriented cross-dialectal diachronic research.
The release and aspiration of word-final /t/ and /d/ are important sociolinguistic variables in American English because they have strong, contextually driven indexicality. Word-final /t d/ releases are usually coded impressionistically due to the absence of automated methods for identifying prepausal release bursts or aspiration. This paper introduces an automated method for identifying released tokens prepausally and for measuring phonetic properties of releases. We use the method to code prepausal /t d/ release versus non-release in a corpus of conversational English in Raleigh. We assess the data in relation to internal and social factors in order to validate the automated method, finding that the patterns in the automatically generated distributions match those in previous studies. We next show that among Raleigh White speakers but not Black speakers, /t d/ releases are becoming more frequent and stronger after obstruents across apparent time, a change that reflects Raleigh’s changing cultural landscape.
