An individual's language can change in the moment due to the topic of conversation and over time because of regional mobility. This paper investigates the relationship between these two types of shifts by asking whether speakers with substantial second dialect exposure change their pronunciation more when the topic changes in a regionally meaningful way compared to speakers with less exposure. Specifically, topic-based shifts on three phonological variables that differ between British and US English are investigated in native speakers of both dialects as a function of the migrant status of the speaker. Experience matters in that speakers only shift between variants in their repertoire, and expatriates have acquired some second dialect features that nonmigrants do not have. However, it does not appear that more exposure to, or increased rates of usage of a variant leads to more topic-based shifting toward that variant. These findings, interpreted within the existing literature, suggest that topic-based shifts are driven primarily by stereotypical sociolinguistic representations.

This article presents results of a sociolinguistic study of a Northern Russian dialect as spoken in a small rural community of Pokcha in the Western Urals, Russia. Because of a number of social influences, the dialect has been undergoing a rapid shift towards Standard Russian. The study examines two sound changes in progress: (1) a merger of unstressed mid back vowels and (2) a split of a post-alveolar fricative into two phonemes. The focus of the study is on the role of social factors—age, mobility, education, and sex—in determining the dynamics of the two rather different phonological processes.I am grateful to Jack Chambers for his encouragement and advice throughout this project. I thank Joseph Schallert, Keren Rice, and an anonymous reviewer for many helpful comments and suggestions on the article. I also thank Dr. Tatyana Permyakova and Dr. Irina Rusinova of Perm' University for their help in the organization of my field trip to Cherdyn' region, Russia. All errors are my own. This research was partly supported by a travel grant from the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies.Some of the results of this study have been previously reported in: Kochetov, Alexei. (2000). Sound change in progress: An effect of standardization on a Northern Russian dialect. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 18:62–79.

We present acoustic and auditory analyses of changes to coda /r/ and voice quality in Glasgow English in the early twentieth century. Our initial acoustic analysis suggests that /r/ was weakening across the board based on an increase in F3. However, an auditory analysis of the same data finds no significant changes. An acoustic analysis of the same speakers’ vowels reveals that the shift in F3 is not unique to /r/. It reflects a change in voice quality, which we link to velarization using Vocal Profile Analysis. We then reanalyze the acoustic /r/ data, controlling for voice quality, and find only moderate changes that are restricted to females. These findings provide new evidence for diachronic changes in voice quality, contribute to our understanding of the development of /r/ in Glasgow English, and highlight the importance of investigating speech sounds in their broader context using multiple methodologies.

Comprehensive investigations of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) have demonstrated that most features of AAVE reported in the sociolinguistic literature are consistently seen in nearly every African-American speech community in which vernacular speech has been documented. This article highlights quantitative regional differences in the speech produced by African-American children from three U.S. cities in an academic setting. In this analysis, 157 5- to 8-year-old African-American children in New Orleans, LA, Washington, DC, and Cleveland, OH imitated the sentences of a story presented in Standard American English (SAE) by teachers. The 15 sentences included many items that were possible mismatches between the child's vernacular and SAE. Afterwards, the children retold the story in their own words. Children's use of SAE and AAVE features in both tasks was analyzed. Higher rates of AAVE feature use occurred in New Orleans than in Cleveland or Washington, DC.

As a so-called non-null subject language, it has been proposed that in English, unexpressed subjects occur only in registers that have specific grammatical properties. We test this hypothesis through a comparison of the conditioning of subject expression for third-person singular human specific subjects in English conversation and narrative. Despite a stark difference in the rates of nonexpression (4% in conversation vs. 22% in narratives), there is no evidence of different grammars across the registers—in both, outside of coreferential clauses conjoined with a coordinating conjunction, unexpressed subjects only occur in prosodic initial position in main clause declaratives. Within the variable context, in both registers, expression is sensitive to accessibility, priming, and temporal sequentiality. A register effect is, however, evident in the contextual distribution, with a larger proportion of the narrative tokens occurring in contexts propitious to unexpressed subjects, and it is this that accounts for the higher rate of nonexpression in this register.

Germanic preterite morphology has been the subject of a bewildering number of studies, looking especially at the competition between the so-called strong inflection (operating with ablaut), and the so-called weak inflection (operating with suffixation). In this study over 250,000 observations from twelve centuries of Dutch were analyzed in a generalized linear mixed-effect model gauging the effects of a multitude of language-internal factors, ranging from various frequency measures to various form-related factors and how they interact with each other. This study confirms the well-known effects of token and type frequency, finding that formal similarities can be both a driving and conservative force in language change and demonstrates that not all members (i.e., preterites and past participles) of a verb paradigm change at the same time, which is both an effect of their frequency and their formal coherence within the paradigm.

Some recent research proposes that changes observed in the morphology and syntax of Vernacular Black English (VBE), combined with the failure of VBE to participate in regional changes in the pronunciation of white speech, constitutes evidence for the divergence of VBE from white and standard varieties. The present article presents quantitative evidence for a change in VBE which appears to involve increasing similarity between VBE and other varieties: a marked tendency toward higher, fronter realizations of the final /i/ in words like happy in the speech of younger blacks. Evidence for the character of the change comes from English dialectology, historical phonology, and research conducted by the author on the speech of residents of East Palo Alto, California. It is proposed that whereas black and white varieties may remain distinct, undergoing some changes separately, this need not be regarded as absolute divergence. Distinct varieties in contact may, for complex sociological and linguistic reasons, be expected more realistically to appear to diverge and converge simultaneously.

Although personality-related factors play a crucial role in sociolinguistics as conceivable sources of language variation and change, there is insufficient quantitative evidence on such relationships. Using a large and balanced sample (n = 1000), this study investigated effects of personality traits on the use of a Swiss German plural marker in its early stages of diffusion. Besides age and region, conscientiousness and extraversion emerged as the most important predictors: less conscientious and, to a certain extent, more extraverted speakers were more likely to contribute to the diffusion of the morphological innovations under investigation. Based on our results, we argue that less conscientious speakers might monitor their own speech and that of others less closely, thus adopting innovations earlier, whereas extraverted speakers may act as successful brokers in transmitting innovations from one social group to another.

The acoustic energy of 996 tokens of word-initial /f/ in the speech of 38 speakers of Mexican Spanish was analyzed. The results suggest that the frequency with which words occur in phonological contexts favorable to reduction (Frequency in a Reducing Context or FRC) conditions the reduction of /f/, even after taking into account the immediate phonological context. Despite this, it is also found that the conditioning effect of FRC is less robust than the influence of the immediate phonological context, thus confirming the preeminence in these data of the online articulatory factors in comparison to the usage-based frequency factors.

The spread of the new quotative be like throughout the English-speaking world is a change from above for each community that receives it. Diffusion of this form into Philadelphia is traced through the yearly interviews of the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus, beginning with young adults in 1979 and spreading to adolescents in 1990, a generation later. The first users of be like form the Avant Garde, young adults with extensive awareness of linguistic patterns within and without the city. The use of this quotative in Philadelphia is favored by constraints that are found elsewhere, particularly to introduce inner speech that is not intended to be heard by others and to cite exemplars of a range of utterances. Not previously reported is a strong tendency to be favored for quotations with initial exclamations, prototypically expressions of surprise and alarm such as “Oh” and “Oh my god!”.

This study reconstructs the present temporal reference system of Early African American English by investigating the linguistic factors conditioning several variables within the domain of present temporal reference in three representative varieties. Previous studies have focused only on the opposition between Ø and -s in the present tense, ignoring other morphosyntactic constructions. Expanding the variable context to present temporal reference, I demonstrate that different constructions convey different aspects: the previously noted association between -s and habitual aspect is confirmed, but Ø is also associated with an aspectual distinction—that of duration. The progressive is used most often with nonstative verbs to denote durative aspect, whereas its much rarer use with statives appears to reflect an older stage in its “grammaticization.” Combining variationist analysis with the comparative method, this reconstruction provides linguistically meaningful explanations of the observed variability and places it within the context of the development of the English language.

This article examines two well-known innovations in Canadian English (CE)—(æ) Retraction and Lowering (e.g., mad, pat) and (aw) Fronting (e.g., loud, mouse)— with a view to discovering the routes by which phonological change diffuses. The data are from St. John's, Newfoundland, one of the few remaining Canadian communities where the variety spoken by the founding population remains relatively intact. Because this variety is leveling toward CE (Clarke, 1991), the St. John's context enables us to tap into processes of dialect shift while they are taking place. This glimpse reveals the developmental nature of linguistic constraints during the early stages of change. Moreover, by focusing on preadolescent and adolescent speakers, age groups that are often overlooked in favor of adult samples (Eckert, 1988:183), the analysis situates the locus of change on the adolescent years. Taken together, these results provide an important gauge for tracking the progress of phonological change.Special thanks to Jack Chambers, Sandra Clarke, Hank Rogers, and Sali Tagliamonte for generously sharing their support, insights, and expertise. Appreciation also goes to Erik Thomas for imparting his knowledge of phonetic conditioning effects. Finally, I am grateful to the four anonymous reviewers whose comments strengthened this article enormously. All errors remain, of course, my own. An earlier version of this article was presented at NWAV 31 in October 2002. This work was supported in part by a Dean's Fellowship at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and by SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship #752-2002-2177.

We analyze change in variable subject/verb and noun phrase concord in Rio de Janeiro Portuguese using trend samples from 1980 and 1999/2000. Plural marked forms exhibit increased frequency in this period, reversing earlier trends toward loss or stability in a development typical of flows and counterflows in the community. The directionality of most structural and social dimensions does not change, but age patterns shift. Our aim is to investigate how groups of speakers evolve over time. Comparison of same-age groups at different moments does not yield insight and is not conducive to apprehending patterns of evolution because speakers move from one age group to another. We set up age cohorts so as to sample virtually the same universes. Examining age cohorts, we see increased frequency of number concord, although the original pattern of relative usage is preserved. Speakers are on the move, but constrained by social patterns in which they are situated. The pattern is broken precisely by those who were not in it, the unborn in the 1980s, who reverse direction dramatically toward increased usage of concord.

This paper provides the beginnings of a pan–South African English dialectology, characterizing five cities (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, Johannesburg, and Durban) and four ethnicities (Black, Colored, Indian, and White), via a single vowel, BATH (or /ɑ:/). From interviews with 200 selected speakers, 5553 tokens were subjected to acoustic analysis via PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2010), yielding bivariate data on vowel quality. Statistical analysis via analysis of variance focused on sets of five persons in each of 40 city-ethnicity-gender combinations. Overall, no city shows cohesion across all ethnic groups, though Kimberley, the smallest of the cities, and Johannesburg, the largest, come close. Conversely, no ethnicity shows cohesion across all cities, although Black speakers of traditional L2 English background come close. There is a robust regional difference for Colored speakers between Johannesburg and the other cities. Gender effects are notable: women's means are closer to the historically prestige [ɑ:] variant than the historically broader variant [ɔ:] in 6 of 20 possible groupings by city and ethnicity; in none of the cases is the opposite true.

Close examination of five constraint hierarchies involved in the vocalization of /l/ in Australian and New Zealand English across five geolinguistic scales (individual, local, regional, national, and supranational) reveals patterns of variation that allow us to distinguish linguistic processes that are universal from those that are particular. Based on 42 goldvarb analyses, we use probability weights to measure the variation in the order and contrast within and across constraint hierarchies. Geolinguistic scale analysis shows that some constraints are scale independent (i.e., they do not vary in order or contrast with changes in geolinguistic scale), whereas others are clearly scale dependent and do vary systematically with changes in geolinguistic scale. We propose a universality continuum in which constraint hierarchies that exhibit near invariance across all geolinguistic scales are at one end of the continuum and constraint hierarchies that vary with geolinguistic scale are at the other end. Scale dependency in constraint hierarchies identifies where social processes can intervene in universal linguistic processes.We would like to thank Sali Tagliamonte for engaging with us in a discussion of the problems associated with comparing goldvarb analyses. We would also like to thank Meriam Meyerhoff for suggesting that we look at the individual scale. In addition, a thoughtful reviewer carefully laid out the potential statistical problems associated with our approach to the comparison of goldvarb analyses. We have attempted to defend the approach taken, but recognize that the discussion of comparative goldvarb analysis warrants further consideration.

Language variation is often symptomatic of ongoing historical change, including grammaticalization. Signed languages lack detailed historical records and a written literature, so tracking grammaticalization in these languages is problematic. Grammaticalization can, however, also be observed synchronically through the comparison of data on variant word forms and multiword constructions in particular contexts and in different dialects and registers. In this paper, we report an investigation of language change and variation in Auslan (Australian Sign Language). Signs glossed as finish were tagged for function (e.g., verb, noun, adverb, auxiliary, conjunction), variation in production (number of hands used, duration, mouthing), position relative to the main verb (pre- or postmodifying), and event types of the clauses in which they appear (states, activities, achievements, accomplishments). The data suggest ongoing grammaticalization may be part of the explanation of the variation—variants correlate with different uses in different linguistic contexts, rather than social and individual factors.

Continuity and Change in Present-Day Swedish: Eskilstuna Revisited is a large-scale study of language change in real time. In this article, the focus is on the results of a trend study and the analysis of how extralinguistic and linguistic factors influence how language varies and changes.

The empirical material consists of informal conversationlike interviews, in which seven morphological and morphophonological variables have been analyzed in terms of the traditional extralinguistic factors of social group, gender, and age, as well as in terms of social networks. These morpho(phono)logical variables are sociolinguistically marked and have been hypothesized to show a process of more or less rapid change from regional dialect toward spoken standard. The rate of change at the level of the community has been slow, however. Comparisons between the influence of extralinguistic and linguistic factors indicate that social forces are more influential than linguistic ones.

This article describes a morphosyntactic feature of the Xining dialect that is unique among all Chinese dialects: that is, the use of a postposition to express ablative nominal relationships. The postposition [t[curly-tail lowercase c]ia] is invariably pronounced in the neutral tone and has no cognates in either earlier varieties of Chinese or among present Chinese dialects. The morpheme's origin is shown to have come from a neighboring non-Sinitic language. Moreover, the variations within the syntactic expression of the ablative are correlated with various sociolinguistic groups. These correlations suggest an ongoing change in the dialect's morphosyntactic system of a kind rarely observed among Chinese dialects. Finally, the process of linguistic change is correlated with demographic changes within the Xining region that show Xining is a place where language contact and rapid linguistic change are likely to be found.

The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems like the Low-Back-Merger Shift. We chart such change in acoustic data from seven generations of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels affected by both the SVS and LBMS (dress, trap), plus price and face, known respectively to monophthongize and centralize in the SVS, and LBMS-implicated lot/thought. The SVS is most advanced among Georgians born in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in face-centralization. In Generation X, retraction of front lax vowels begins, leading toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels, support findings that regional vowel systems declined precipitously following a Gen X “cliff,” raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in demographic transformations of that time period.

This article explores the relationship between the global functions of variable subject-verb order and morpholexical class of subjects in the spoken Arabic of the Arabian peninsula. Using corpus-based methods, it is shown that lexical class—pronoun, pronominal, noun—definiteness, and the discourse-defined lexical specificity of a noun all correlate significantly with subject-verb or verb-subject word order. The global function of the two orders is explored using an array of measures to show that verb-subject order prototypically presents events, while subject-verb signals available referentiality. Using the quantitatively based study of Anthony Naro and Sebastiao Votre ([1999]. Discourse motivations for linguistic regularities: Verb/subject order in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Probus 11:75–100.) on Brazilian Portuguese as a point of comparison, a typological framework is developed for understanding languages with variable subject-verb order.