Perceptual dialectology investigates lay perceptions of how linguistic information relates to geographic information, often by asking participants to mark on a blank map how people speak in different areas. In studies of the United States, Kansas is often left off these maps as not particularly notable. This study investigates the beliefs and attitudes that Kansans and non-Kansans have about speech in the state by asking about the likelihood of talkers with various U.S. regional dialects of being from Kansas. Participants rated talkers from various U.S. dialect regions on how "accented" they sounded and how likely they were to be from Kansas. Results revealed contrasting beliefs: Kansans associated Kansas speech with unaccentedness, while non-Kansans associated Kansas speech with Southern-accented voices. Factor analysis of social trait ratings indicated that voices perceived as "Midwestern" and "nice" predicted higher Kansas-likelihood ratings, particularly for Kansans, whereas non-Kansans linked Kansas speech to "Southern" characteristics. Acoustic analysis showed that Kansans were more attuned to local features, such as /ae/-retraction, while non-Kansans relied on stereotypically Southern vowel features when judging Kansas likelihood. Both groups, however, demonstrated accurate geographic knowledge of Kansas. Findings highlight the role of experience in perceptions of regional speech, particularly for varieties lacking salient stereotypes.
This article examines changes in the qualities of Donald Trump's vowels from 1980 to 2023. Trump's lifelong navigation of national celebrity presents an opportunity to bringtogether research strands exploring (1) lifespan language change among public personalities and (2) politicians'selection of variants to present public identities. Trump's home dialect of New York City English (NYCE) provides indexicalities for Trump to draw upon-for instance, to highlight "New Yorker" identity or project qualities of toughness. At the same time, Trump's curated personal qualities of toughness and inflexibility might align with resistance to language change, and NYCE may be sociolinguistically marked as incongruous with attainment of high social status. Using a corpus of70 speech events, we find that Trump has generally resisted ongoing NYCE vocalic changes. However, Trump has lowered /D/ across his adult lifespan and, to an extent, reduced his NYCE short-a split. We interpret this pattern as suggesting that, despite Trump drawing actively on his links to New York City and curatinga public personality that can be enhanced by NYCE, he is nevertheless influenced by vocalic changes and sociolinguistic ideologies that were present during childhood language acquisition.
This article investigates the perception of contact-induced semantic shifts in Quebec English, that is, preexisting English words whose meaning is influenced byformally orsemantically similar French words (e.g., circulation'traffic', cf. Frcirculation). Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with 15 Montrealers, who were asked to assess the acceptability of 40 semantic shifts. Item-level explanatory factors point to four variation profiles, ranging from a strongassociation with geographic origin and bilingualism to near-universal acceptance. Participant-level trends suggest that semantic shifts are driven byyounger, actively bilingual speakers who are well-integrated into the local community. This is mirrored by spontaneous remarks indicatingthat semantic shifts may index both a local and a bilingual identity. Overall, this study provides greater clarity on the factors behind contact-induced semantic shifts in Quebec English as well as a methodological blueprint forfurthersociolinguistic work on lexical semantic phenomena.
The idea of "richness" from the work ofJohn Dewey suggests how the occurrence and distribution of words in speech and in texts and the facts of word distributions work with our cognitive faculty to create meaning. Lexical richness is something that each of us experiences individually, but each of us experiences differently. The richness of words comes not just from the uniqueness of events in our individual experience, but from the cognitive resonance of those events. Lexical richness also comes from our experience of trying to share ourthoughts and words with others, adding experience with words themselves to our experience with events in our process of creating meaning with language. Lexical richness exists not just for individuals but also at the level ofthe language. Lexical richness, then, including the ever-present fact of variation in how speakers use words, should be an essential part of our study of human speech.
