This article provides a comparative overview of phonological and phonetic differences of Mukrī Kurdish varieties and their geographical distribution. Based on the examined data, four distinct varieties can be distinguished. In each variety area, different phonological patterns are analyzed according to age, gender, and social groups in order to establish cross-regional and cross-generational developments in relation to specific phonological distributions and shifts. The variety regions which are examined in the present article include West Mukrī (representing an archaic form of Mukrī), Central Mukrī (representing a linguistically peripheral dialect), East Mukrī (representing mixed archaic and peripheral dialect features), and South Mukrī (sharing features of both Mukrī and Ardałānī). The study concludes that variation in the Mukrīyān region depends on phonological developments, which in turn are due to geographical and sociological factors. Moreover, contact-induced change and internal language development are also established as triggering factors distinguishing regional variants.

Using a novel, digitized method, this paper investigates the language attitudes of 18- to 33-year-olds in South East England. More broadly, this paper demonstrates that disambiguating the language attitudes held towards sociodemographic groups and geographic areas is paramount to understanding the configuration of language attitudes in an area, particularly for areas with high cultural and linguistic heterogeneity. A total of 194 respondents evaluated the speech of 102 other south-eastern speakers. Results reveal an imperfect mapping between language attitudes held towards geographic areas and speakers from these areas. Although East London and Essex are the most negatively evaluated areas, speakers’ demographic and identity data is the primary factor conditioning language attitudes. Across South East England, working-class and/or ethnic minority speakers, as well as those who identify their accent in geographically marked terms, are evaluated most negatively, which is compounded if they are from East London or Essex.

This article describes the results of a research project carried out over a period of 25 years on the spoken Irish Gaelic of the Aran Islands, Co. Galway, Ireland. It combines microdialectology with sociolinguistics and investigates a wide range of phonological, grammatical, and lexical variables. In addition to revealing complex patterns of geolinguistic variation involving small local areas on the main island and on neighboring islands, it also shows the clear influence of age, gender, and individual creativity on the patterns of variation.

This analysis examines the ways in which a single speaker, Ana, born in mid-century East Los Angeles, organizes and reflects upon her experiences of the city through language. Ana’s story is one that sheds light on the experiences of many Mexican Americans who came of age at a critical time in a transitioning L.A., and the slow move of people who had been up until mid-century relegated largely in and around racially and socioeconomically segregated parts of L.A. These formative experiences are demonstrated to have informed the ways that speakers parse the social and geographical landscape along several dimensions, and this analysis interrogates the symbolic value of a special category of everyday language, deixis, to reveal the intersection between language and social experience in the cityscape of L.A. In this way, it is analytically possible to not only approach the habituation and reproduction of specific deictic fields as indexical of the ways that speakers parse the city, but also to demonstrate the ways in which key moments in the history of the city have shaped the emergence and meaning of those fields.

This paper studies the perception of regional variation in Russian among young Russian nonlinguists in Moscow, Perm, and Novosibirsk. I explore the labels used in 55 perceptual maps and categorize them in order to investigate the perceived character of regional variation among young Russians, including their explanations for regional variation. The data analysis shows that claims about regional variation are based on the informants’ assessments of variation in Russian, but also on assessments of domains that they perceive as related to regional variation: style and accent, as well as extralinguistic features such as geography and climate. Based on this analysis, I argue that the line between regional language variation and other variations can be conceived of as fuzzy.