This paper investigates use of ain't in a corpus of naturalistic speech from forty-two African-American Philadelphians. Use of ain't in past/perfective contexts where it varies with didn't is considered a unique feature of AAE. This use is compared in apparent time to uses of ain't in tense-aspect environments shared with other English varieties. Results show that past/perfective uses of ain't increased during the twentieth century while use in other contexts remained stable, supporting the hypothesis that past/perfective uses resulted from recent change. Generalized linear models for ain't in past/perfective and other contexts show that sociostylistic and linguistic constraints are otherwise the same across contexts. Finally, evidence that a past/perfective use of ain't resulted from either the phonetic reduction of didn't or a shift in meaning from uses of ain't in anterior contexts is examined.

This paper provides a unified phonologically motivated explanation for the movement of trap, dress, and kit following the low-back merger in North American English (i.e., the Canadian Shift, California Shift, Low Back Merger Shift, Third Shift, etc.). The explanation puts forth that the three-way merger of lot, palm, and thought results in the loss of the [+Front] feature specification for trap, opening the door for dispersion focalization to pull trap toward the low central region of the vowel space. Analogy then prompts all other [−Peripheral] vowels, including strut and foot, to centralize. Crucial to this explanation is that the low-back merger includes palm, not just lot and thought. Evidence for this requirement is presented in a phonetic analysis of older speakers from conservative Victoria, British Columbia. The explanation presented here reconciles an earlier proposal (Roeder & Gardner, 2013) with Fruehwald's (2017) observation that parallel movement requires a shared feature specification.

In this study, we investigate first-person-singular subject expression in Louisiana French. This variety is undergoing language death and features extreme variation, with twelve first-person-singular subject forms identified within our corpus. We demonstrate that variationist methods are robust for examining such variation in obsolescing languages, and we provide a model for undertaking such analyses. Examining different aspects of our data, we fit two mixed-effects models, one that analyzes the four most frequent phonological variants of the atonic pronoun je ‘I’ and the other that focuses on the tonic pronoun mon ‘me.’ Several linguistic and social factors predict the use of these subject forms, supporting the claim that variability in declining languages is systematic, just as variation in healthy languages is. We argue that variationist methodologies have contributions to make to research on obsolescing languages and that variationist examinations of endangered and minority languages can provide methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of language variation and change more broadly.

The aim of this study is to further contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the nature of “morphosyntactic lifespan change,” defined here as observable shifts in the grammatical choices individuals make between competing morphosyntactic structures. Through a quantitative case study of competition between two types of ing-nominals in seventeenth-century English, in which we factor in the grammatical contexts in which the variant structures can be used, we show that individuals vary in the extent to which they participate in the contextual diffusion of a new structure. We furthermore show that there is interindividual variability with respect to whether and what kind of lifespan change—frequency, constraint, and inventory change—is attested and highlight different patterns of intraindividual change: progressive, retrograde, and “mixed.”

This paper presents the first sociophonetic study of Sanapaná (Enlhet-Enenlhet), spoken by around one thousand people in Paraguay. It examines the effects of L2 (Spanish/Guaraní) fluency and loss of L1 exposure on vowel quality and within-category variability of /e, o/ productions in the Sanapaná /e, a, o/ system. Data from eleven native Sanapaná speakers suggest that age and multilingualism may have little explanatory power by themselves. Speakers living in a majority-L2 environment show greater within-category variability and increased convergence of /e, o/ toward the L2 high vowels /i, u/ than daily users of Sanapaná. This suggests that decreased L1 exposure is the main factor driving language shift-related change in Sanapaná. I explain these findings in an exemplar-theoretic framework. Although the number of speakers sampled is limited, these data provide a valuable addition to our knowledge of sociolinguistic variation in small, underrepresented communities.