Though less often reported on than discrimination based on race or religion, linguistic discrimination has been robustly demonstrated in perception work showing that second language speakers are perceived to be less employable than standard-accented speakers. To better understand this in the Australian context, we ran a perception experiment in which 153 listeners rated speakers' employability on three 5-point Likert scales. The audio stimuli were extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with speakers of Australian English from five groups: first language speakers of English from Anglo, Cantonese, and Lebanese backgrounds, and first language speakers of Mandarin and Russian. We found that, first, while linguistic background had no effect for male speakers, it did for female speakers, with Anglo women rated the most employable and Russian-speaking women the least employable. Second, listener gender had no effect for first language speakers, but both Mandarin and Russian speakers were rated comparatively higher by women than men. And third, an interaction between speaker gender and listener gender showed that only female listeners rated female speakers comparatively higher than male speakers. Listeners are thus attuned not only to accent, but also to demographic factors, highlighting the need for consideration of social characteristics in potential accent bias, in particular, gender.

Sydney Speaks is a sociolinguistic project exploring variation and change in Australian English. The Sydney Speaks corpus combines two legacy sub-corpora recorded in the 1970s and 1980s (Barbara Horvath's Sydney Social Dialect Survey and the NSW Bicentennial Oral History Collection) with a contemporary sub-corpus, recorded from 2015 to the present (the ANU Corpus of Sydney Speech). Recordings come from oral histories and sociolinguistic interviews with 265 Sydneysiders, born from 1889 to 2001, stratified according to age, social class, gender and ethnicity. To date, approximately 120 h (1.2 million words) have been transcribed and time aligned at both the utterance and segment level. The corpus makes a unique contribution to the study of ethnic variation: as a longitudinal corpus, it facilitates real-time exploration of ethnic variation, allowing questions around the longevity of ethnolects to be answered; the class stratification of the data allows for consideration of the intersection between class and ethnicity; transcriptions that are time aligned at the level of the Intonation Unit and at the level of the segment allow for analyses of phonetic, morphosyntactic and discourse features; and the content of the interviews both provides contextualization for the linguistic patterns observed and sheds light on Australia's history.

Work on variable (ing) has highlighted its long-term stability and shared conditioning across English varieties. Here, we ask whether similar stability and conditioning holds in Australian English over time and across ethnicity. The data come from sociolinguistic interviews with 204 Australians stratified according to age, gender, social class and ethnicity, drawn from the Sydney Speaks project. Analyses of 13,000 (ing) tokens reveal very low alveolar rates, but generally similar conditioning to that of other English varieties, with the exception of word class, for which variability was initially largely limited to verbal tokens before extending to include the pronouns something and nothing . Ethnic differences are evident in rates of use: Italian Australians evince higher, and Greek and Chinese Australians lower, rates of [n]. These differences are accounted for by class affiliations, suggesting that (ing) may be an ideal variable for considering the interplay between social class and ethnicity.

Shifts in the frequencies of English modals of obligation have been linked to shifts in modal function and changing interpersonal authority. Interpretation of over 2,000 tokens in spontaneous speech data recorded in Sydney, Australia, in the 1970s and 2010s establishes a replicable classification of obligation meanings, based on source of obligation, with a three-way distinction between Hierarchical authority, General circumstances, and Personal choice. Competing expressions for these obligation types, besides have to, have got to, and older must, include should and, recently, need to. Two sets of regression analyses provide evidence of covariation of form and function: first, the linguistic and social conditioning of forms, with meaning as one of the predictors; and second, the conditioning of function, with modal form as a predictor. Need to rises in real time and so does talk of personal obligation. However, the change in modal function is concomitant with, but independent of, shifting modal forms.

Are semantic classes of verbs genuine or do they merely mask idiosyncrasies of frequent verbs? Here, we examine the interplay between semantic classes and frequent verb-form combinations, providing new evidence from variation patterns in spontaneous speech that linguistic categories are centered on high frequency members to which other members are similar. We offer an account of the well-known favoring effect of cognition verbs on Spanish subject pronoun expression by considering the role of high-frequency verbs (e.g., creer ‘think’ and saber ‘know’) and particular expressions ((yo) creo ‘I think’, (yo) no sé ‘I don’t know’). Analysis of variation in nearly 3000 tokens of unexpressed and pronominal subjects in conversational data replicates well-established predictors, but highlights that the cognition verb effect is really one of 1sg cognition verbs. In addition, particular expressions stand out for their high frequency relative to their component parts (for (yo) creo, proportion of lexical type, and proportion of pronoun). Further analysis of 1sg verbs with frequent expressions as fixed effects reveals shared patterns with other cognition verbs, including an association with non-coreferential contexts. Thus, classes can be identified by variation constraints and contextual distributions that are shared among class members and are measurably different from those of the more general variable structure. Cognition verbs in variable Spanish subject expression form a class anchored in lexically particular constructions.

Structural priming has been described as a measure of association between constructions. Here, we apply priming as a diagnostic to assess the status of the Chilean second-person singular (2sg) voseo, which exists in variation with the more standard tuteo. Despite being the majority variant in informal interactions, Chileans are reported to have little metalinguistic awareness of voseo and they avoid the vos pronoun, in some cases using the tú pronoun with voseo verb forms, leading to proposals that tuteo and voseo are conflated into a single mixed form. The patterning for priming, however, indicates otherwise. Analyses of some 2000 2sg familiar tokens from a corpus of conversational Chilean Spanish reveal that a previous tuteo or voseo favors the repetition of that same form, indicating that speakers do treat these forms as distinct. We also observe that invariable forms with historically tuteo morphology are associated with neither voseo nor tuteo, while the invariable voseo discourse marker cachái ‘you know’ retains a weak association with voseo. Furthermore, while tuteo is favored with a tú subject pronoun, this effect does not override the priming effect, evidence that, even with a tú pronoun, voseo and tuteo are distinct constructions in speakers’ representations.

Ethnic and ethnolectal variation in migrant communities have received much attention, but the manifestation and longevity of this variation is not yet well understood. Capitalising on Barbara Horvath’s foundational study of social variation in Australian English, and a comparable, recent corpus of sociolinguistic interviews (Sydney Speaks 2010s), we present a real-time test of ethnic variation in the speech of approximately 170 Australians over a 40-year period. We examine the speech of Anglo-, Italian- and Chinese-Australians, focusing on five diphthongs considered to be characteristic of Australian English. Analyses of over 20,000 tokens reveal no wholesale differences among ethnic groups, but they do reveal some differences in the progression and social conditioning of changes over time, which we argue are best understood in relation to the social nature of the changes undergone.

Does bilingualism bring about structural similarity between the languages in contact? The convergence evaluation metric illustrated in this chapter relies on appropriate data—speech corpora from a well-established bilingual community and from monolingual benchmarks—and a replicable method—diagnostic differences between languages pivoted on the probabilistic structure of internal variation. For variable subject expression, one diagnostic difference lies in prosodic position: the variable context for null subjects in English, outside coordinate clauses, is restricted to verbinitial prosodic units, which, conversely favor pronominal subjects in Spanish. A second quantitative measure is found in accessibility: the effect of coreferentiality and clause linking with the preceding subject is stronger in English than in Spanish. On both measures, bilinguals’ English and Spanish line up with their respective monolingual counterparts and, most remarkably, are different from each other, refuting morphosyntactic convergence. When both languages are in regular use, bilingualism is compatible with continuity rather than change, being best characterized as alternation between, not mixing of, languages.

We examine variation in a rural variety of Acehnese spoken in Aceh Province, to better understand the impact of long-term contact with Indonesian and increasing urbanization. The Great Aceh variety is characterized by variable realization of word-final (t) as a dental vs. glottal stop. Analyses of over 2,000 tokens of this variable from a corpus of spontaneous speech from 35 speakers indicate that the variability is relatively stable among men, and among women of high mobility, measured in terms of education, occupation, and time spent outside Great Aceh. Women with low mobility produce the lowest rates of [t & x32a;], and in this group we observe a higher rate of [t & x32a;] by younger than older women, suggesting change over time. We thus find both stability - among those who have long enjoyed high levels of mobility - and change - among those most affected by recent social changes, namely low-mobility women.

Abstract Forced aligners have revolutionized sociophonetics, but while there are several forced aligners available, there are few systematic comparisons of their performance. Here, we consider four major forced aligners used in sociophonetics today: MAUS, FAVE, LaBB-CAT and MFA. Through comparisons with human coders, we find that both aligner and phonological context affect the quality of automated alignments of vowels extracted from English sociolinguistic interview data. MFA and LaBB-CAT produce the highest quality alignments, in some cases not significantly different from human alignment, followed by FAVE, and then MAUS. Aligners are less accurate placing boundaries following a vowel than preceding it, and they vary in accuracy across manner of articulation, particularly for following boundaries. These observations allow us to make specific recommendations for manual correction of forced alignment.

Increased global migration to international urban centres has motivated a growing interest in ethnolects and the role migrant communities play in language variation and change. Here, we consider ethnolectal variation in real and apparent time, by examining the realization of word-final (er) (e.g. teacher, remember) in Australian English. We capitalize on sociolinguistic interview data collected by Barbara Horvath in Sydney in the 1970s as a benchmark against which to compare newly collected recordings with Sydneysiders in the 2010s. Approximately 15,000 tokens of word-final (er) were extracted from the speech of nearly 200 people, including Anglo-Australians, and second-generation migrants of Italian, Greek and Chinese background. Acoustic analyses of vowel duration and position in the vowel space reveal incremental lengthening with concomitant lowering and backing over time for (er), though only in prosodically final position. This change was led by Greek and Italian teenagers in the 1970s, then taken up by working class women, and today, has been adopted across the community. Tracking this change in real and apparent time provides evidence that ethnolectal features may be adopted by the wider community, with ethnic minorities playing a leading role in language change.

Written entirely in Spanish, this is the ideal introduction to Spanish linguistics for students. Using clear explanations, it covers all the basic concepts required to study the structural aspects of the Spanish language – phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics – as well as the history of Spanish, its dialects, and its linguistic variation in Latin America, Spain, and the US. This third edition incorporates new features designed to enhance its usefulness for classroom teaching: a new chapter on the teaching and learning of Spanish as a second language, expanded discussion of syntax, and more detailed coverage of Spanish semantics and pragmatics. Numerous exercises have been added throughout the text, some of which are now presented as problems for students to solve, allowing students to gain a more complete mastery of the analytical concepts at hand.

Written entirely in Spanish, this is the ideal introduction to Spanish linguistics for students. Using clear explanations, it covers all the basic concepts required to study the structural aspects of the Spanish language – phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics – as well as the history of Spanish, its dialects, and its linguistic variation in Latin America, Spain, and the US. This third edition incorporates new features designed to enhance its usefulness for classroom teaching: a new chapter on the teaching and learning of Spanish as a second language, expanded discussion of syntax, and more detailed coverage of Spanish semantics and pragmatics. Numerous exercises have been added throughout the text, some of which are now presented as problems for students to solve, allowing students to gain a more complete mastery of the analytical concepts at hand.

Written entirely in Spanish, this is the ideal introduction to Spanish linguistics for students. Using clear explanations, it covers all the basic concepts required to study the structural aspects of the Spanish language – phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics – as well as the history of Spanish, its dialects, and its linguistic variation in Latin America, Spain, and the US. This third edition incorporates new features designed to enhance its usefulness for classroom teaching: a new chapter on the teaching and learning of Spanish as a second language, expanded discussion of syntax, and more detailed coverage of Spanish semantics and pragmatics. Numerous exercises have been added throughout the text, some of which are now presented as problems for students to solve, allowing students to gain a more complete mastery of the analytical concepts at hand.

Written entirely in Spanish, this is the ideal introduction to Spanish linguistics for students. Using clear explanations, it covers all the basic concepts required to study the structural aspects of the Spanish language – phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics – as well as the history of Spanish, its dialects, and its linguistic variation in Latin America, Spain, and the US. This third edition incorporates new features designed to enhance its usefulness for classroom teaching: a new chapter on the teaching and learning of Spanish as a second language, expanded discussion of syntax, and more detailed coverage of Spanish semantics and pragmatics. Numerous exercises have been added throughout the text, some of which are now presented as problems for students to solve, allowing students to gain a more complete mastery of the analytical concepts at hand.

Until recently, large-scale phonetic analyses have been out of reach for under-documented languages, but with the advent of methodologies such as forced alignment, they have now become possible. This paper describes a methodology for applying forced alignment (using the Montreal Forced Aligner) to a speech corpus of Matukar Panau, a minority language spoken in Papua New Guinea. We obtained measurements for 68,785 vowel tokens, produced in both narrative and conversational data by 34 speakers. We examined the social conditioning on a subset of these vowels according to traditional sociolinguistic categories of age and gender, and also consider the impact of clan as a major axis of organization in this community. We show that there is a role for clan as a sociolinguistic factor in conditioning the variation