We investigate the impact of medium of communication (in-person versus video) on intraspeaker variation in conversation—a process we refer to as medium-shifting. To quantify the effects of medium-shifting and understand its possible motivations, we analyze three variables that show intraspeaker effects of “clear” or “careful” speech: articulation rate, density-controlled vowel space area, and (ING). The data come from matched in-person and video-mediated interviews with thirty-three repeat guests from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, recorded before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mixed-effects regression models show that compared to in-person interviews, video-mediated interviews involve a significantly lower articulation rate and larger vowel space, but no significant difference in (ING). The results suggest that speakers may engage in medium-shifting in order to enhance their intelligibility over video, for example, through more precise articulatory movements and greater contrast between phonemic vowel categories. The null effect of medium on (ING) further suggests that medium-shifting is a motivator of intraspeaker differences even within a single contextual style. An emergent extralinguistic factor affecting speaking behavior and choices, medium-shifting should be carefully considered especially when designing variationist research involving mixed media interviews.

This study reports on an experiment with twenty preschool children (3;1–4;7) in York, UK to investigate the earliest stage of children's socioperceptual development. The children discriminate between different groups of speakers based on their pronunciation of phonological regional variables diagnostic of the North and South of England. An improvement across the age range uncovers a developmental stage when children are able to interpret variation as socially meaningful. This is comparable with developments in sociolinguistic production during the preschool years, as previous studies have found. Three measures associated with linguistic input (children's age and gender, local versus nonlocal parents) have an impact on the children's performance. The results are interpreted through an exemplar theoretic account, highlighting the role of input and the combined storing and accessing of both linguistic and social information.

Phonological and morphological variation in Classical Latin (e.g., diphthongs ae/au vs. monophthongs e/o, retention vs. loss of final consonants and initial h-, GEN SG -is vs. -us/-os, DAT SG in -ae vs. -a, etc.) has typically been treated as regional in nature. However, these seemingly “rural” features cannot be considered instances of purely geographically based variation, for they also occur both on inscriptions from within Rome and in Roman literary usage. Coleman (1990:14) hinted at “a social dimension” to this variation, but only for au versus o variation. We argue, however, that a distinctly social dimension must be recognized for much of this variation, based on: (a) instances of hypercorrection; (b) the observation that datives in -a occur only in private, primarily domestic, inscriptions and never in public or official inscriptions; (c) Augustus's use of “rural” domos for domus, in keeping with the populist image he cultivated upon his return to Rome. This dialectal/sociolectal situation can be best understood, we argue, in terms of the model of urbanization of Milroy (1980) and Bortoni-Ricardo (1985). The transformation of originally geographic variation into socially determined variation in an urban setting resulted from migrations into Rome and the expansion of Rome after the 4th century b.c.

This study reports the results of a crosslinguistic matched guise test examining /s/ and pitch variation in judgments of sexual orientation and nonnormative masculinity among English, French, and German listeners. Listeners responded to /s/ and pitch manipulations in native and other language stimuli (English, French, German, and Estonian). All listener groups rate higher pitch guises as more gay- and effeminate-sounding than lower pitch guises. However, only English listeners hear [s+] guises as more gay- and effeminate-sounding than [s] or [s−] guises for all stimuli languages. French and German listeners do not hear [s+] guises as more gay- or effeminate-sounding in any stimulus language, despite this feature's presence in native speech production. English listener results show evidence of indexical transfer, when indexical knowledge is applied to the perception of unknown languages. French and German listener results show how the enregistered status of /s/ variation affects perception, despite crosslinguistic similarities in production.

In our study of concord phenomena in spoken Brazilian Portuguese we found disfluencies, including apparent corrections, in about 15% of the relevant tokens in our corpus of recorded speech data. Disfluencies have very little effect on the rate of marking. When fluency is included in a variable rule analysis as a factor group containing categories for different types of disfluency, as well as for data without any disfluency, it is not selected as statistically significant. Furthermore, separate analyses of all data, only fluent data, and only disfluent data revealed no significant changes in the numerical results obtained for other factor groups. We conclude that, at least insofar as the variable phenomena we studied are concerned, speech is not overly laden with errors; there is nothing in the data to mislead the language learner.

Much has been written about the relationship between the usage of particular social groups and language change. This article reports on a longitudinal study of lexical variables that analyzed comparable data from the 1930s and 1990. Nearly 1,000 words were tested to determine differences in usage related to age, sex, race, education, region, and rurality. Another set of tests compared the terms used at each point in time. Yielding a list of words that exhibited both change and a pattern of social or regional variation, the results indicated that males, whites, older speakers, and speakers from rural areas use more older terms. The most educated speakers use more newer terms. These findings were reinforced by an analysis of “No Response” answers, especially on questions about obsolete or agricultural referents, which were more common among females, blacks, and urban dwellers. Most of the linguistic change was not accompanied by significant social variation.

Catalan sociolinguistics has investigated in depth the uses of Catalan and the attitudes toward it but has only analyzed very sporadically the mechanisms of linguistic change in this language. The study presented in this article is an attempt to describe an ongoing linguistic change that has been observed in a speech community (E1 Pont de Suert) of the Alta Ribagorça, a region in Catalonia (Spain) where the borderline between Catalan and Aragonese, a variety of Spanish, can be delimited. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, the article seeks to demonstrate that a gradual substitution of the autochthonous variant [t∫] by the normative [3] of the phoneme /3/ appears to be taking place in El Pont de Suert, and to determine, at the same time, the linguistic and social factors that favor this substitution. Second, its purpose is to analyze the variation of this phoneme in relation to not only geographic but also social and linguistic variables; this is because a study that considers only geographic factors would describe the characteristics that differentiate the Ribagorca speech from other Catalan speech varieties but would not account for the existing variation in the use of both the voiceless affricate and the voiced fricative.

The causation of language change is a problem with a high profile in sociolinguistics. This paper presents two contrasting models of language change: one that is based on sociopsychological factors (Kristiansen & Jørgensen, 2005) and one that rejects them (the Napoleon Principle, Brink & Lund, 1979). In a longitudinal study of individuals' changing pronunciation of the Danish aj-diphthong over 20 years, we test predictions following from the sociopsychologically oriented model. By the mid-1980s, female speakers used more aj-pronunciations that are associated with high socioeconomic status than did male speakers. However, in guise tests, females revealed a more positive attitude toward speech associated with low socioeconomic status. Our prediction that female speakers would change their speech patterns to include more aj-pronunciations associated with low socioeconomic status is supported by an analysis of the same female speakers' pronunciations as recorded in the mid-2000s.

The Indo-Portuguese (IP) creoles display a well-known and uniform manner of marking the simple past and present continuous with the preposed particles ja (<Ptg. já ‘already’) and tE (<Ptg. esta ‘is’), respectively. Moreover, n3 (<Ptg. no ‘in the’) and d3 (<Ptg. de ‘of, from’ or do ‘of, from the’) are typically used as prepositions to express goal or location. Those creoles with Neoaryan adstrat languages, of which Korlai Creole Portuguese (KP) is one, theoretically possess the option of deleting these markers or prepositions if they are contextually or otherwise redundant. Using data from several sources spanning approximately 100 years, it is shown that ja, tE, n3, and d3 in KP have undergone or are undergoing gradual deletion. It is argued that this development is part of a much larger SVO → SOV shift. The status of the typological shift indicators of verb-object/complement, adposition, and adjective-noun order are shown to corroborate the findings regarding deletion.

This paper promotes a sophisticated treatment of gender in variationism through a large-scale quantitative analysis of creak, a nonmodal voice quality stereotypically associated with women in US English. An analysis of our gender-diverse corpus, including cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, finds that gender does not predict variation; all gender groups produce high rates of creak. However, gender does interact with style: all speakers use more creak in interview speech compared with read speech, but some groups style-shift more than others, suggesting that gender remains a relevant factor in capturing how creak is deployed as a resource in social practice. We use this analysis to advocate for a move beyond the gender binary in quantitative descriptions of sociolinguistic variables and call for the greater inclusion of trans+ individuals in sociolinguistics.

The existing literature on vocalic variation in Scottish English has shown that variation tends to pattern according to the age, gender, and socioeconomic class of the speaker. However, studies that employ these gross social categories are unable to explain the variation that exists within these categories. This article therefore presents an alternative approach. Based on data from 16 adolescents who form a community of practice in west Fife, Scotland, this article attempts to consider both social and cognitive motivations for linguistic variation. The theoretical framework of Cognitive Grammar is particularly well-suited to incorporating sociolinguistic variation, and this article illustrates how an exploration of frequency effects and schematic organization can lead to a more insightful understanding of the patterning of two vocalic variables in a community. This article also explores the implications of these findings for our understanding of the place of sociolinguistics in cognitive theories of linguistics.

The present study is an attempt to investigate Japanese as it is spoken in Tokyo within the variationist framework, focusing on the variable (ng). The results of earlier research and observation have shown that this variable has been in the process of change. Speakers at younger age levels favor the newer variant [g], while those at older age levels favor the older variant [ŋ]. Results of quantitative analyses of the data obtained from sociolinguistic interviews with 62 native speakers of Tokyo Japanese allow us to establish the case under investigation as one of diffusion from above. The findings of the present investigation add to the body of research conducted within the variationist framework; they confirm the existence of inherent variation and orderly heterogeneity.

Subordinate clauses in Brazilian Portuguese can be introduced by the complementizers que or de que, both corresponding to ‘that’. Both variants are attested even in the earliest documents, although de que is an innovation with respect to Latin. In the standard language, each variant is used in its own characteristic contexts, but in current usage there is variation. Here, the replacement of either variant by the other is treated in a unified manner, with one phenomenon viewed as the mirror image of the other. Psycholinguistic dimensions, such as the parallel processing effect and the effect of distance, are shown to be connected with the semantic dimension of iconicity.

The English spoken by Creole African Americans in southern Louisiana reveals language change in the shift from French to English and the persistence of local forms of English. The overview of the socioeconomic history of Louisiana details the number of ethnic groups and the fluctuating social and linguistic relations among them over time. The study sample consists of 42 African Americans with French ancestry living in Opelousas in St. Landry Parish and Parks in St. Martin Parish. The high rate of the absence of glides in the vowels (ai, au, oi, i, u, e, o) is maintained across all generations of the 24 male speakers described. A possible source of glide absence, such as foreign language influence, is explored but found unconvincing. A more plausible explanation is that glide absence was part of the English brought to the area by native speakers in the early 19th century.We acknowledge the generous support of the National Science Foundation (BSR-0091823) as well as the coding work done by two research assistants Vicky Polston and David Herrell. We also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the text and their valuable comments.

The level of penetration of standard Italian pronunciation norms into a rural Southern Italian dialect is examined, and the factors that influenced this italianization are assessed.

This study investigates the current status of the vowel /y/, a phoneme that has undergone complete diphthongization to [wi] in Seoul Korean (Choo & O'Grady, 2003; Kang, 1997; Kim, 1988; Martin, 1992), in Chinese Korean. Set in the context of language and dialect contact, where Chinese language and different local/supralocal Korean norms all come into play, especially when the closed local social network no longer exists, Chinese Korean develops unique patterns of variation for underlying /y/, patterns heretofore unreported in the studies of other Korean varieties. Chinese Korean provides a case in point toward the explanation for how effects exerted by linguistic and social factors within a speech community may alter the diffusion of a change with origins outside the local network.

Spanish is characterized by number concord in determiner phrases (DPs) and predicate nominals; the plural marker /s/ is attached to all relevant elements in a plural DP. Exceptions to this rule usually involve phonetically motivated processes of /s/-weakening in coda position, and do not result in a functionally different system of plural marking. A distinct pattern is found in two isolated dialects of Spanish spoken in ethnically cohesive Afro-descendent communities where Spanish was originally acquired as a second language by speakers of African languages. In both varieties, characterized by the absence of /s/-reducing phenomena, plural /-s/ tends to be marked only on the first element of plural DPs, usually a determiner. In one of the dialects, spoken in Ecuador, these “stripped plurals” alternate with full multiple plural concord, similar to vernacular Brazilian Portuguese. In the other dialect, spoken in Bolivia, stripped plurals appear to be a recent development, emerging from a more restructured traditional variety in which plural /-s/ was not used at all. A variational analysis of both dialects finds little evidence for spontaneous drift away from canonical multiple plural marking, but rather suggests an evolution from earlier contact-induced interlanguages that exhibited even less systematic plural marking. The appearance of Afro-Hispanic stripped plurals is tentatively correlated with the shift from a depleted definite article system to a configuration more closely resembling modern Spanish. A similar set of circumstances may have contributed to the formation of stripped plurals in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese.

Although there is no consensus on whether French has any true modal auxiliary, devoir ‘must’ is one of the very few possible candidates. Most studies of devoir concentrate on criteria for distinguishing its epistemic and root semantic values, but some also explore the subtle semantic nuances it conveys depending on context. Here, we identify discrete meanings through the analysis of semantic overlaps between devoir and other French modal expressions, such as probablement ‘probably’, être supposé ‘to be supposed to’, or falloir ‘ought to’. The analysis of data from two corpora on Montreal French, collected in 1971 and 1984, shows that:

1. There is only one root semantic value exclusively associated with devoir, namely, the notion of desirability (as in the English ‘should’).

2. There are different patterns of use of the competing modal expressions within each semantic field analyzed, according to the social class of the speaker. Moreover, some patterns characterizing a specific social group are acquired relatively late.

It is not difficult to find grammatical and lexical markers of Fiji English. But are there any phonological features that identify an individual as a speaker of this regional variety of English? For the vast majority of Fiji Islanders, English is their second (or third) language, and their accents clearly identify their linguistic background (e.g., indigenous Fijian or Indo-Fijian). However, one pronunciation feature seems to be shared by a vast majority of speakers of English in Fiji: the deletion of yod in non-primary stressed /Cju/ syllables. This article considers variation in yod pronunciation according to ethnicity, age, gender, and education and examines whether yod deletion is a phonological shibboleth of Fiji English or merely a feature of L2 English.

Dans le cadre de la théorie du gouvernement et du liage, cet article présente une explication du changement survenu dans la distribution du sujet pronominal et du sujet nul Pro en moyen français. Après avoir montré que cette langue de type V2 ne manifeste pas l'asymétrie principales/subordonnées caractéristique des langues germaniques, nous proposons d'identifier la position de Pro selon le principe de m-command. Pour remplacer le paramètre d'uniformité morphologique de Jaeggli et Safir (1989), qui n'a pas rendu compte des propriétés de la flexion verbale dans la langue étudiée, nous recourons à la sousspécification du trait de nombre comme procédure d'identification du contenu de Pro. Dans un modèle où le contenu de Pro est identifie selon une hiérarchie des traits de personne et de nombre, nous attribuons la perte de Pro-drop à la fin du moyen français au fait que le trait nombre est devenu inerte dans la syntaxe.