After the Franco dictatorship, written Catalan started to be taught officially in the schools of Catalonia. This teaching has involved a change in some phonetic, morphological, and lexical habits, especially among speakers schooled in Catalan as a first language. The present study shows a linguistic change process observed in Northwestern Catalan linguistic communities. Its focus is the study of absolute initial prestressed vowels spelled 〈e〉 which have traditionally been uttered with solution [a] in forms such as encara ‘yet’ or estudi ‘study’. The population analyzed is the one that is receiving or has received the biggest influence from written language: speakers between 3 and 20 years of age. The data obtained allows us to observe a phonetic change directly connected to writing.I would like to thank Carlos van Oosterzee and James McCullough for discussion. This research was supported by HUM2004-01504/FILO (MEC & FEDER).

Studies of accommodation between different dialects have to a greater or lesser extent focused on languages with a spoken standard or a socially prestigious dialect. Irish (Gaelic) has no spoken standard, nor can any of the three major spoken dialects be considered more socially prestigious than the others. This article reports on a pilot study that explores cross-dialect speaker interaction in a task-oriented context focusing primarily on prosodically induced effects on prominence and duration. Although accommodation was not found on a large scale in the synchronous speech task involved, interaction among various pairs of speakers raised interesting questions, both linguistic (e.g., what level of linguistic detail is perceptually relevant) and methodological (e.g., how best to study linguistic interaction between speakers from noncontiguous dialect areas when there is no standard dialect).I would like to thank Fred Cummins whose work on synchronic speech inspired the present study and who assisted in the recording. I would also like to thank Jaye Padgett, Lillis Ó Laoire, Diarmuid Ó Sé, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier version.

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.