Two general principles of sexual differentiation emerge from previous sociolinguistic studies: that men use a higher frequency of nonstandard forms than women in stable situations, and that women are generally the innovators in linguistic change. It is not clear whether these two tendencies can be unified, or how differences between the sexes can account for the observed patterns of linguistic change. The extensive interaction between sex and other social factors raises the issue as to whether the curvilinear social class pattern associated with linguistic change is the product of a rejection of female-dominated changes by lower-class males. Multivariate analysis of data from the Philadelphia Project on Linguistic Change and Variation indicates that sexual differentiation is independent of social class at the beginning of a change, but that interaction develops gradually as social awareness of the change increases. It is proposed that sexual differentiation of language is generated by two distinct processes: (1) for all social classes, the asymmetric context of language learning leads to an initial acceleration of female-dominated changes and retardation of male-dominated changes; (2) women lead men in the rejection of linguistic changes as they are recognized by the speech community, a differentiation that is maximal for the second highest status group.

When one form replaces another over time in a changing language, the new form does not occur equally often in all linguistic contexts. Linguists have generally assumed that those contexts in which the new form is more common are those in which the form first appears and in which it advances most rapidly. However, evidence from several linguistic changes (most importantly the rise of the periphrastic auxiliary do in late Middle English) shows that the general assumption is false. Instead, at least for syntactic cases, change seems to proceed at the same rate in all contexts. Contexts change together because they are merely surface manifestations of a single underlying change in grammar. Differences in frequency of use of a new form across contexts reflect functional and stylistic factors, which are constant across time and independent of grammar.

What is the explanation for vigorous variation between was and were in plural existential constructions, and what is the optimal tool for analyzing it? Previous studies of this phenomenon have used the variable rule program, a generalized linear model; however, recent developments in statistics have introduced new tools, including mixed-effects models, random forests, and conditional inference trees that may open additional possibilities for data exploration, analysis, and interpretation. In a step-by-step demonstration, we show how this well-known variable benefits from these complementary techniques. Mixed-effects models provide a principled way of assessing the importance of random-effect factors such as the individuals in the sample. Random forests provide information about the importance of predictors, whether factorial or continuous, and do so also for unbalanced designs with high multicollinearity, cases for which the family of linear models is less appropriate. Conditional inference trees straightforwardly visualize how multiple predictors operate in tandem. Taken together, the results confirm that polarity, distance from verb to plural element, and the nature of the DP are significant predictors. Ongoing linguistic change and social reallocation via morphologization are operational. Furthermore, the results make predictions that can be tested in future research. We conclude that variationist research can be substantially enriched by an expanded tool kit.

Speaker's sex has emerged as one of the most important social factors in the quantitative study of phonological variation. However, sex does not have a uniform effect on variables or even on variables that represent sound change in progress. This is because sex is not directly related to linguistic behavior but reflects complex social practice. The correlations of sex with linguistic variables are only a reflection of the effects on linguistic behavior of gender — the complex social construction of sex — and it is in this construction that one must seek explanations for such correlations. Sociolinguists generally treat sex in terms of oppositional categories (male/female), and the effects of sex on variation are generally sought in linguistic differences between male and female speakers. However, because gender differences involve differences in orientation to other social categories, the effects of gender on linguistic behavior can show up in differences within sex groupings. Data on sound changes in progress (the Northern Cities Chain Shift) among Detroit area adolescents show that gender has a variety of effects on variables and that the significance of gender in variation cannot be reduced to notions of male or female speech as “more or less conservative.”

The literature on frequency effects in lexical diffusion shows that even phonetically gradual changes that in some cases are destined to be lexically regular show lexical diffusion while they are in progress. Change that is both phonetically and lexically gradual presents a serious challenge to theories with phonemic underlying forms. An alternate exemplar model that can account for lexical variation in phonetic detail is outlined here. This model predicts that the frequency with which words are used in the contexts for change will affect how readily the word undergoes a change in progress. This prediction is tested on data from /t, d/ deletion in American English. Finally, the effect of bound morphemes on the diffusion of a sound change is examined. The data suggest that instances of a bound morpheme can affect the rate of change for that morpheme overall.

The use of apparent time differences to study language change in progress has been a basic analytical construct in quantitative sociolinguistics for over 30 years. The basic assumption underlying the construct is that, unless there is evidence to the contrary, differences among generations of similar adults mirror actual diachronic developments in a language: the speech of each generation is assumed to reflect the language more or less as it existed at the time when that generation learned the language. In providing a mirror of real time change, apparent time forms the basis of a conceptual framework for exploring language change in progress. However, the basic assumptions that underlie apparent time have never been fully tested. This article tests those assumptions by comparing apparent time data from two recent random sample telephone surveys of Texas speech with real time data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, which was conducted some 15 years before the telephone surveys. The real time differences between the linguistic atlas data and the data from the telephone surveys provide strong support for the apparent time construct. Whenever apparent time data in the telephone surveys clearly suggest change in progress, the atlas data show substantially fewer innovative forms. Whenever the apparent time data suggest stable variation, the atlas data are virtually identical to that from the more recent surveys. Whenever the relationships between real and apparent time data are unclear, sorting out mitigating factors, such as nativity and subregional residence, clarifies and confirms the relationships. The results of our test of the apparent time construct suggest that it is unquestionably a valid and useful analytical tool.

Though the diachronic dimension of linguistic variation is often identified with linguistic change, many stable linguistic variables with no synchronic motivation show historical continuity with little change over long periods of time. Children acquire at an early age historically transmitted constraints on variables that appear to have no communicative significance, such as the grammatical conditioning of (ing) in English. Studies of (td) and (ing) in King of Prussia families show that children have matched their parents' patterns of variation by age 7, before many categorical phonological and grammatical rules are established. Some dialect-specific and socially marked constraints are acquired before constraints with general articulatory motivation. Constraints on (td) appear in the speech of a 4-year-old, but there is no evidence in the productions of a 2-year-old child in the same family.

The article models the spread of linguistic change by taking precise account of the ages of the acquirers and transmitters of change. Several studies, some original, are reviewed in order to address the following questions: “What types of linguistic feature can an individual acquire at different ages?” “How much influence do people of different ages exert on the speech of other individuals?” The article is organized around three key interlocutor combinations: parent-infant/young child, peer group-preadolescent, and older adolescent/adult-adolescent. The studies suggest that borrowings are the easiest to acquire, while lexically unpredictable phonological changes are the most difficult. In between are Neogrammarian changes and morphologically conditioned features. The age of the speaker is critical; only the youngest children acquire the “hardest” features. However, adolescents may be the most influential transmitters of change. A difficulty hierarchy for the acquisition of second dialect features is then presented; it is suggested that this predicts the nature of linguistic change found under different sociolinguistic conditions. The approach presented here allows for a more detailed understanding of the spread of linguistic change.

Whether some languages or dialects are spoken faster or slower than others constitutes a gap in the understanding of sociolinguistic variation. Speech tempo is interconnected with the social, physical and psychological marking of speech. This study examines regional variation in articulation rate and its manifestations across speaker age, gender, and speaking situations (reading vs. informal talk). The results of an experimental investigation show that articulation rate differs significantly between two regional varieties of American English examined here. A group of Northern speakers (from Wisconsin) spoke significantly faster than a group of Southern speakers (from North Carolina). With regard to age and gender, young adults read faster than older adults in both regions; in informal talks, however, only Northern young adults spoke faster than older adults. Effects of gender were smaller and less consistent; men generally spoke slightly faster than women did. As the body of work on the sociophonetics of American English continues to grow in scope and depth, we argue that it is important to include fundamental phonetic information as part of our catalog of regional differences and patterns of change in American English.

Long, complex phrases tend to come at the ends of clauses; this is called “endweight.” A variety of characterizations of weight have been proposed in the literature, but none has been sufficient to cover the full range of attested cases of end-weight. Corpus data on heavy NP shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight that are highly correlated with constituent ordering. Proposed explanations for endweight have been based on parsing considerations, largely ignoring the speaker; but what facilitates parsing does not always help in production. Examination of phenomena where these interests do not coincide indicates that the demands of sentence planning provide a better explanation for end-weight than parsing. Finally, accounts of end-weight cannot be purely structure-based, but must take lexical factors into consideration.

Following recent work that questions traditional social categories, this paper examines the role of ethnicity in conditioning linguistic variation. Reporting on a large-scale project in the multicultural context of Toronto, we argue for combining emic and etic approaches to social categorization. Focusing on the Chinese and Italian communities, our analysis of two sociolinguistic variables shows that speakers may vary in overall rate, but linguistic conditioning remains largely constant across and within ethnic groups. Whereas there is evidence for language transfer in the first generation, differences between generations suggest that transfer does not persist. Some speakers appear to use overall rates to express ethnic identity. Differences between communities may be explained in terms of different timelines of settlement and visible-minority status.

Variationist treatments of phonological processes typically provide precise quantitative accounts of the effects of conditioning environmental factors on the occurrence of the process, and these effects have been shown to be robust for several well-studied processes. But comparable precision in theoretical explanation is usually elusive, at the current state of the discipline. That is, the analyst is usually unable to say why the parameters should have the particular values that they do, although one can often explain relative ordering of environments. This article attempts to give a precise explanation — in the form of a quantitative theoretical prediction — of one robust quantitative observation about English phonology. The reduction of final consonant clusters (often called -t,d deletion) is well-known to be conditioned by the morphological structure of a target word. Deletion applies more in monomorphemic words (e.g., mist) than in inflected words (e.g., missed). In the theory of lexical phonology, these classes of words are differentiated by derivational history, acquiring their final clusters at different levels of the morphology. The theory further postulates that rules may apply at more than one level of the derivation. If -t,d deletion is treated as a variable rule with a fixed rate of application (p0) in a phonology with this architecture, then higher rates of application in underived forms (where the final cluster is present underlyingly and throughout the derivation) are a consequence of multiple exposures to the deletion rule, whereas inflected forms (which only meet the structural description of the rule late in the derivation) have fewer exposures and lower cumulative deletion. This further allows a precise quantitative prediction concerning surface deletion rates in the different morphological categories. They should be related as an exponential function of p0, depending on the number of exposures to the rule. The prediction is empirically verified in a study of -t,d deletion in seven English speakers.

Recent work on acquisition in sociolinguistic research suggests that some aspects of the structured variation found in adult speech are evident in children's speech from the very start of language acquisition, and input from the primary caregiver is crucial in this process. In this article we contribute to this research by conducting a cross-sectional analysis of the acquisition of variable forms in a Scottish dialect. Two linguistic variables are targeted in the speech of eleven children (2;10–3;6) and their primary caregivers. Quantitative analysis of over 5000 contexts of use demonstrates that one variable is conditioned by social and linguistic constraints in the speech of the caregiver and these constraints are matched by the children. In contrast, the other variable is influenced by a complex array of linguistic constraints only. We explore the ramifications of these findings for understanding the mechanisms involved in acquisition of variation from the very earliest stages.We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council for award no. RES-000-22-0447. We thank Jack Chambers, Paul Foulkes, and three anonymous reviewers for very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. We would also like to thank Hazel Steele for her input to the project in its early stages, and Moira Smith, our invaluable on-site fieldworker. We dedicate this article to the caregivers and children of Buckie who were willing to share their walks, playtimes, bathtimes, and even “meltdowns,” all in the name of linguistic research.

Whereas Labov (1991) made a case for the existence of three major dialects of English, this article offers Canadian evience that runs counter to the idea of a relatively homogeneous North American third dialect area in which vowel systems remain fairly stable. It shows that the lax vowels of Canadian English are undergoing a substantial shift, the pivot for which is suggested to be vowel merger in the Cot/Caught sets. This shift is to some degree conditioned by the voicing properties and the manner of articulation of a following consonant; gender differences prove significant as well. The article also examines back vowel fronting in Candian English and its relationship to the shift affecting the front lax vowels, as well as to the general principles of vowel chain shifting articulated by Labov (1994). The Canadian Shift raises the issue of internal versus external motivation of vowel change; in addition, it brings, macrosociolinguistic evidence to bear on the purely microsociolinguistic interpretation of similar patterns of vowel shifting as symbols of local group identity (Eckert, 1991b).

This study investigates how linguistic variation carries social meaning, examining the impact of the English variable (ING) on perceptions of eight speakers from the U.S. West Coast and South. Thirty-two excerpts of spontaneous speech were digitally manipulated to vary only in tokens of (ING) and used to collect listener perceptions in group interviews (N = 55) and an experiment (N = 124). Interview data and experimental results show that (ING) impacts social perception variably, inhabiting an indexical field of related meanings (Eckert, Penelope. [2008]. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4):453–476). One of these meanings, intelligence/education, is explored in detail to understand how a given meaning is realized or not in a specific context. Speakers were heard as less educated/intelligent when they used -in, but this effect is driven by reactions to speakers heard as aregional and not as working-class. Some implications on our future understanding of the processing of socially laden variation are discussed.

Nonce borrowings in the speech of bilinguals differ from established loanwords in that they are not necessarily recurrent, widespread, or recognized by host language monolinguals. With established loanwords, however, they share the characteristics of morphological and syntactic integration into the host language and consist of single content words or compounds. Furthermore, both types of loanwords differ from intrasentential code-switching — alternate sentence fragments in the two languages, each of which is grammatical by monolingual standards from the standpoints of appropriate function words, morphology, and syntax. In a large corpus of Tamil—English bilingual speech, many words of English origin are found in objects governed by Tamil verbs and vice versa. The equivalence constraint on intrasentential code-switching predicts that no code-switch should occur between verb and object in an SOV/SVO bilingual situation, and hence that objects whose language differs from that of the verb must be borrowed, if only for the nonce. To verify this prediction, we compare quantitatively the distribution across various syntactic contexts of both native Tamil and English—origin complements of Tamil verbs, and find them to be parallel. But the strongest evidence in favor of the nonce borrowing hypothesis comes from an analysis of variable accusative and dative case marking in these complements, in which the English-origin material is shown, morphologically and syntactically, to be virtually indistinguishable from Tamil (nonpronominal) nouns. In addition, we present supporting evidence from the genitive, locative, and other cases and from nonce borrowings from Tamil into these speakers' English.

Structural priming refers to the process whereby the use of a syntactic structure in an utterance functions as a prime on a subsequent utterance, such that that same structure is repeated. This article investigates this phenomenon from the perspective of first-person singular subject expression in Spanish. Two dialects and two genres of spoken Spanish are studied: New Mexican narratives and Colombian Spanish conversation. An analysis of 2,000 verbs occurring with first-person singular subjects reveals that subject expression undergoes a priming effect in both data sets, but that the effect is more short-lived in the Colombian data. This is found to be attributable to the interactional nature of these data, showing that the need to deal with interactional concerns weakens the priming effect. As the first study to compare priming of subject expression across distinct genres, this article makes an important contribution to our understanding of this effect, and in particular, of factors that play a role in its maintenance or dissipation in discourse.I would like to thank Rena Torres Cacoullos for her many invaluable comments on this article and Jill Morford and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi for helpful discussion on the notion of priming. I also gratefully acknowledge Jessi Aaron and Matt Alba for help with the coding and analysis; Neddy Vigil and Garland Bills for making the New Mexican data available to me; Ana Aurora Medina Murillo for help with the transcription of the NM data; and María Elena Rendón, Marianne Dieck, and Rocío Amézquita for the collection and transcription of the Colombian data.

Use of discourse markers by 17 speakers of Anglophone Montreal French (AMF) showed great variation in individual repertoires and frequency of use. Only five subjects manifested rates of usage comparable to those of native speakers or to their own LI usage in English. In decreasing order of frequency, the speakers used tu sais ‘y'know’; là ‘there’ (the most frequent among L1 Montreal French speakers); bon ‘good’, alors ‘so’, comme ‘like’, and bien ‘well’; and the local discourse conjunction fait que ‘so’. The subjects occasionally made use of the English markers you know, so, like, and well. Québécois French markers with no English equivalent were used by the speakers who had been exposed to French in their early childhood environment. The one marker that showed influence from English was comme, apparently calqued on English like. Overall, frequent use of discourse markers correlated only with the speakers' knowledge of French grammar – evidence that a higher frequency of discourse marker use is the hallmark of the fluent speaker. As a feature that is not explicitly taught in school, mastery of the appropriate use of discourse markers is thus particularly revealing of the speakers' integration into the local speech community.

In this article we perform a quantitative analysis of verbs of quotation in a cohesive speech community. The incoming form be like overshadows all other quotative verbs among speakers under 30. This telescoped rate of change provides an opportunity to investigate the actuation problem as well as to probe the underlying mechanism of change in the contrasting variable grammars across generations. Multivariate analyses of factors conditioning be like (content of the quote, grammatical person, sex) reveal stability in the significance of constraints, however the rankings and relative strengths reveal subtle ongoing changes in the system. Interpreting these in sociocultural context, we suggest that be like is an innovation that arose out of a preexisting niche in the grammar. It accelerated during the 1980s due to its preppy associations, later specializing as a marker of narrative present. In accounting for these findings, we are led to contrast generational and communal change and to question what it means to ‘participate’ in linguistic change.The first author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for grant #410-2003-0005 “Linguistic changes in Canada entering the 21st century” and the Research Opportunities Program at the University of Toronto (ROP). Special thanks are owed to the research assistants on these projects who have been instrumental in transcribing, and in some cases extracting, the data: Stephanie Cali, Jonille Clemente, Derek Denis, Louis Filipe, Kevin Galloway, Marion Hau, Matthew King, Megan Lyon, Marion Macdonald, Sonja Molfenter, Jenny Seppänen, Karina von Stedingk, Muhammad Velji, Jessica Wertman, Lina Yang, and Stacy Yeh. An earlier version of this article was presented at NWAVE 33 (Ann Arbor, October 2004), where feedback from our audience was instrumental. We are also grateful to Nathalie Dion and Shana Poplack for their discerning comments on an earlier written version.

In this article, I describe a new research project on York English (YrkE), a variety in northeast England. In addition to providing the first systematic linguistic documentation of YrkE, I conduct a quantitative analysis of a linguistic feature which not only is well documented in the literature, but also recurs pervasively in varieties of English worldwide—was/were variation in the past tense paradigm. Two separate tendencies are observed, neither of which can be explained by any unidimensional notion of analogical leveling of the paradigm: (1) nonstandard was in existential constructions, and (2) nonstandard were in negative tags. Both trends can be tracked in apparent time in which the contrasting behavior of men and women reveals that women are leading both types of linguistic change. In other contexts, nonstandard was is a synchronic remnant which can be traced to earlier stages in the history of English.