Work in sociolinguistic typology and creole studies has established the theory that intensive language contact involving second language acquisition by adults tends to lead to grammatical simplification. This theory is built on many anecdotal case studies, including developments in the history of Continental North Germanic associated with contact with Middle Low German. In this paper, we assess the theory by examining two changes in the history of Norwegian: the loss of coda /Cr/ clusters and the loss of prepositional genitives. If the theory is correct, these changes should have been innovated in centers of contact with Middle Low German. We find that both changes in fact spread into southeastern Norwegian from Swedish. Since contact with Low German also took place in Sweden and Denmark, this is consistent with the theory. It opens questions for future research about the role of dialect contact in simplificatory change in North Germanic.

The use of loanwords is generally attributed to a social feature, like social prestige, and to semantic features, like the need to fill a lexical gap. However, few studies take into account variation in the use of loanwords within a speech community, and directly compare the frequency of loanwords from more than one source language. This paper contributes to research on lexical borrowing by comparing the distribution of loanwords from three different source languages in two large databases of dialect data. We take an onomasiological perspective, which allows us to gauge the frequency of borrowed lexical items vis-à-vis alternative expressions. Using Generalized Additive Mixed Modeling, we show that the usage of loanwords can only be explained by taking into account the interaction between semantics and geographical diffusion. Our analysis confirms that the patterns that occur almost exclusively reflect changes in socio-cultural history.

Texas German is a new world language variety that shows some evidence of koiné development but also presents with substantial variation at many levels of structure. I present a case study on the variant pronunciation of sibilants in Texas German consonant clusters. This feature is fairly frequent and found throughout the regions of German settlement in Central Texas. After a discussion of the presence of this feature in the donor dialects, I investigate the factors that correlate with variation in the modern language. From an analysis of local and global spatial autocorrelation, I argue that variation is not significantly associated with particular geographic regions and is compatible with stable and homogenous variation. This provides insight into our understanding of new dialect emergence and the mechanisms by which dialect features are leveled over multiple generations.

This article explores two fundamental dimensions in sociolinguistics: the dynamics of linguistic variation and change in international languages and the exploitation of data proceeding from significant countries. These issues will be addressed through examination of a particular syntactic feature and a possible change in progress: the occurrence of null direct objects in Spanish. It is shown that for Spanish, a widely used international language, social factors have not been decisive in explaining the distribution of the phenomenon under investigation. This study shows that while direct object omission is not conditioned by typical social variables such as sex, age, and gender, it is unevenly spread throughout the Spanish-speaking world: Mexico and the continental Caribbean use it more than other countries, such as Spain or Chile. Besides the relevance of geography, some semantic, discourse, and contextual factors are shown as determinant for the direct object omission. Finally, this paper reflects on methodology, specifically the use of a macroregional sociolinguistic method for data analysis as well as the advantages and shortcomings of a specific data collection technique that capitalizes on technological tools with global reach: the internet survey in an international scenario.