Modern Standard Albanian is a young variety, proclaimed in 1972 at the Congress of Orthography in Tirana. It is based on the Tosk variety, one of the two main varieties (Tosk and Gheg) of the Albanian language, which is spoken in the South of the country. The aim of the current investigation is to look at the way in which this Standard is realized by its representatives, the educated speakers of four geographical regions: South Albania, Middle Albania, North Albania, and Kosovo. The analysis is based on the realization of stressed vowels. It can be shown that there are striking differences between the speakers of the Republic of Albania and Kosovo, whereas within Albania, speakers from the different geographical regions adopt characteristic features from the other geographical regions. The spread of Standard Albanian is, therefore, not solely an intrusion of the Tosk-based variety into the Gheg varieties, but rather, speakers counterbalance among their varieties on the basis of the alleged variety.This article is a considerably revised version of a presentation given at the 2nd International Conference on Language Variation in Europe at Uppsala University in June, 2003. We are grateful for the comments of participants there and especially grateful for helpful comments by Werner Deutsch and two anonymous referees.

This account deals with a stage of chain shifting in North American English in which the usual tendency to preserve margins of security does not seem to apply. Two vowels follow a collision course with a high degree of overlap. The question then arises as to whether a small difference in vowel length can effectively preserve a phonemic distinction.This paper was first given at NWAV 33, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

As part of a national effort to improve reading levels, spontaneous speech samples were collected from 630 Latino, African American, and white children in grades 2 through 4 in Georgia, California, and Pennsylvania. In this study, data was used from 126 Latinos, and a comparison group of 28 African American and 28 white children to study their use of 3rd person possessive pronouns, periphrastic of possessives, and attributive -s possessives. It was found that Latino children confused his for her and her for his; used more periphrastic of constructions; and omitted the attributive -s marker in noun + -s + noun constructions. Multivariate analyses revealed that beyond Spanish influence, speaker sex, language origin, and grade also affected the expression of possession. Most striking are the differences according to speaker sex, and between Mexican and Puerto Rico origin children, which are considered in light of the closer relationship between Puerto Ricans and African Americans in Philadelphia.The research on which this report is based was carried out at the Linguistics Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania, supported by NSF and the Interagency Educational Research Initiative as proposal 0115676 and the Spencer Foundation under Grant 200200074.

Hogg (2004), Levin (1958), and Ogura (1999) have shown the existence of dialectal differences as regards Old English (OE) negative contraction. This study reassesses the traditional view that OE showed optional use of negative concord (NC), and finds instead that variation in NC was dialectal, based on an analysis of 260 instances of indefinites in OE (prose) negated clauses. Standard West Saxon (WS) texts systematically accompanied a negated indefinite (NI) with the particle ne. In non-WS texts ne use was systematic with a postverbal negated indefinite but variable with preverbal NIs. A sample of 389 NIs in Middle English (ME) verse texts from around 1300 from selected dialect areas showed a similar dissociation. These two sets of findings lend support to the notion of a persisting dialect split in early English whereby symmetrical NC characterized the South/Southwest area while Midland regions of England had asymmetric NC. West Saxon texts may thus represent a regional vernacular tendency as regards NC, not merely a standardized scribal dialect.The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful comments of anonymous referees. All remaining errors and misinterpretations are my own.

This study provides the results of an acoustic analysis of the short front vowels in the speech of New Zealanders born between the 1890s and the 1930s. It will be shown that it is in this period in which the system of short front vowels undergoes a typological change, whereby a system of three short front vowels develops into one of two front vowels ( ) and one central vowel ( ). It will be further shown that these processes are interrelated and can justifiably be called a “chain-shift.” In addition, it will be demonstrated that centralization of postdates the raising of the other vowels, and that rates of centralization are dependent on consonantal environment.I would like to thank the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) as well as the University of Canterbury for funding the research that is discussed here. I would also like to thank Dr. Jen Hay, Professor Lyle Campbell, Dr. Margaret Maclagan, Professor Peter Trudgill, and Professor Elizabeth Gordon for their support and their insightful comments on my work. I am also indebted to Elizabeth Gordon for allowing access to the ONZE (Origins of New Zealand English) data. The intermediate period archive data was collected by Rosemary Goodyear, Lesley Evans, and members of the ONZE team. The work done by members of the ONZE Project in preparing the data, making transcripts, and obtaining background information is also acknowledged.

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).

This article examines dialectal variation in mood choice in journalistic prose after the adverbials después de que ‘after’ and luego de que ‘after’ in subordinate clauses of past temporal complex sentences in Spanish. Because the matrix clause of sentences of this type contains a verb in a past tense, indicating that an action has certainly taken place, the event of the verb in the subordinate clause headed by después de que or luego de que is anterior to this completed event and is also a necessarily completed event that therefore is in a prescriptively indicative context. However, data collected from an on-line corpus of Spanish texts from Spanish-speaking countries and from on-line periodicals show that journalistic prose from Spain universally opts for the subjunctive mood in these contexts, whereas Mexico tends to use the indicative. Other Spanish-speaking countries show varying degrees of frequency of choice for these moods. Previous approaches to explaining mood choice have maintained that variation in mood choice in the complement clause is determined by the intentions of the speaker. The data in this study refute these claims by demonstrating that the use of the indicative or the subjunctive mood is well established in Mexico and Spain, respectively, and variable in the other Spanish-speaking countries.The author wishes to thank the College of Arts and Letters at Old Dominion University for a summer research grant to carry out this study. Special thanks go to Janet Bing, Charles Ruhl, and Alfredo Urzúa of Old Dominion University for their endless patience and attention to detail in reviewing this work. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Keith Walters of the University of Texas at Austin for recommending this journal for the placement of this article.

For fifty years after World War II, Latvia was incorporated into the former Soviet Union. Although in theory the use of regional languages was not discouraged, in practice knowledge of Russian was obligatory. Since 1991, Latvian has again become the official language, and knowledge of Russian is widespread but optional. These political events have created a natural experiment in the effects of almost universal bilingualism on a language. To assess the impact on pronunciation, native speakers of Latvian, ranging from retirement age to teens, were recorded reading a word list and a short narrative. Vowel pronunciation differed across the generations both in quantity relationships and in formant structure.Research for this project was supported by a grant from the International Research and Exchange Board, with funds provided by the U.S. Department of State (Title VII Program) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed here.

For the past fifty years, sociolinguistic studies of linguistic change have focused mainly on phonological variables, but recently some attention has been paid to other features, particularly discourse features used by younger speakers that may change within a relatively brief period. This article deals with the appearance of an unusual intensifier “pure” in the speech of adolescents in Glasgow, Scotland. This usage suggests that the Glasgow working-class adolescents have developed a set of norms for their speech community that owes little to adult or outside influence. Grammaticalization is a process that is normally investigated on the basis of historical documents but recent developments in methodology provide an opportunity to explore changes in progress. Intensifiers have historically been unstable and there is evidence that teenagers have recently been developing their own preferences for such items. The range of uses that the Glasgow adolescents have developed for pure suggests a process of grammaticalization that may still be in progress.The project in which the recordings were made was supported by ESRC grant no. R000239757. I am deeply indebted to Jane Stuart-Smith for providing the transcripts and allowing me to make use of them for this article. The sessions were arranged and conducted by the research assistant on the project, Claire Timmins. It is clear from the transcripts that part of the success of the project was the result of her good rapport with the adolescents. There are many joking references to her in the sessions, although the adolescents knew that she would hear these remarks. All the names in the transcripts have been replaced with pseudonyms. I am grateful for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper from Elizabeth Traugott, Lee Munroe, and the anonymous reviewers for LVC.

The deletion of word-internal alveolar stops in spontaneous English speech is a variation phenomenon that has not previously been investigated. This study quantifies internal deletion statistically using a range of linguistic and extra-linguistic variables, and interprets the results within a model of speech production. Effects were found for speech rate and fluency, word form and word predictability, prominence, and aspects of the local phonological context. Results of the study are compared to results from the numerous studies of word-final alveolar stop deletion, internal deletion in laboratory speech, and also to another internal alveolar stop process, flapping. Our findings suggest that word-internal alveolar stop deletion is not a unitary phenomenon, but two different processes that arise at different points during speech production. In syllable codas, deletion results from cluster simplification to achieve gestural economy and is introduced during segment planning. In syllable onsets, deletion is one outcome of gradient lenition that results from gestural reduction during articulation.The research reported here was supported by NIDCD grant DC004330 to Mark Pitt, Keith Johnson, and Elizabeth Hume. Our thanks to Mark Pitt, Keith Johnson, William Labov, David Sankoff, two anonymous reviewers, and numerous participants of NWAV02 for useful comments and constructive feedback that helped us develop the article.

This study examines synchronic variation in vowels in an effort to advance our understanding of the “transmission problem” in language change, in particular, the cross-generational perseverance of vowel shifts. Seeking a connection to patterns and directions of shifts in vowel systems over time, we examine the role of a largely neglected parameter of structured heterogeneity: prosodic prominence. Experimental data from two Midwestern dialects of American English—central Ohio and south-central Wisconsin—show that, for the vowels studied here, the changes in vowel characteristics observed under higher degrees of prosodic prominence (or greater emphasis) correspond to the changes predicted by well-established principles of chain shifting. An acoustic study assesses variation in prosodic prominence by examining formant frequencies at multiple locations in the course of vowel duration, which provides information about vowel quality dynamics. A perceptual study determines listeners' sensitivity to the obtained acoustic variation, as manifested in specific patterns of vowel identification, confusions, and category goodness ratings. Finally, a prosodically based explanation of the transmission of sound change is described, which offers new connections between structural and social factors in sound change, notably the roles of “social affect” and speaker gender.This article builds on earlier conference papers (Fox, Jacewicz, & Salmons, 2003; Jacewicz & Salmons, 2003; Jacewicz, Salmons, & Fox, 2004a, 2004b; Salmons & Jacewicz, 2004). Additional acoustic analyses and perceptual results from the data set presented here can be found in Jacewicz et al. (forthcoming) and Fox et al. (forthcoming). We thank three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous version of the manuscript. We also thank Kristin Hatcher, Jennifer Mercer, and Dilara Tepeli for help with collection of the perception data. Work supported by NIH NIDCD R01 DC006871-01 and NIH NIDCD R03 DC 005560 to The Ohio State University (Ewa Jacewicz, PI).

In this article we provide a quantitative view on the relationship between standard and dialect in Italy. In Italian sociolinguistics, the concept of dilalìa has been used to account for this kind of linguistic repertoire. This notion will be addressed as the main theoretical frame to our investigation on code choice. Italian sociolinguistics and dialectology so far have come to apparently contradictory results about the standard–dialect relationship and the vitality of dialects. On one side, the main post-war trend shows a fall in the number of dialect speakers (especially the young and the less educated); on the other, we are witnessing a change from above in attitudes and beliefs regarding dialects. We carried out an empirical study in the northwest of the country employing the method of rapid and anonymous street interactions. Our focus being on code choice, we wanted to know what factors affect the presence of dialect, making use of multivariate analysis.This research was part of a larger national project (Cofin 2002–2003) directed by Gaetano Berruto (University of Turin) with the title “Lingua e dialetto in Italia all'inizio del Terzo Millennio” (National language and dialect in Italy at the beginning of the Third Millennium) and involving the universities of Neaples, Lecce, and Rome. Both authors took part in the research unit of Turin. Although the research and the analysis of the data have been conceived and undertaken by both authors, Alessandro Vietti wrote “The results” and “Gender-based-variation” sections while all other parts were written by Silvia Dal Negro.

The present study analyzes the speech of a radio presenter in a local station in Murcia and compares it to the audience's linguistic behavior as shown in the phone calls received during the program. We also analyze the data obtained in an interview with the radio presenter. Our results, which show a radical divergence between the presenter's speech and that of his audience, are contrasted with both Audience Design and Speaker Design theoretical tenets, using the explicit knowledge of the presenter's attitudes and opinions to contrast theory and fact. We conclude that neither model offers a completely satisfactory explanation of the patterns found. Finally, we reflect on the need to consider not only performance, but also the script (in the form of a professional voice used following a particular linguistic policy based on sociolinguistic norms and attitudes to language) that condition the individual linguistic behavior, thus suggesting the need to consider community-specific factors in the explanation of stylistic variation.We are very grateful for Peter Trudgill, David Britain, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Dennis Preston, Dagmar Scheu, Rafael Monroy, and José Jiménez-Cano for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Recent findings have shown that listeners' region of origin and geographic mobility affect their perception of dialect-specific properties of speech in vowel identification and dialect categorization tasks. The present study examined the perceptual dialect classification performance of four groups of listeners using a six-alternative forced-choice categorization task. The residential history of the listeners was manipulated so that the four groups of listeners differed in terms of region of origin (Northern or Midland United States) and geographic mobility (Mobile or Non-Mobile). Although residential history did not significantly affect accuracy in the categorization task, both region of origin and geographic mobility were found to affect the underlying perceptual similarity structure of the different regional varieties. Geographically local dialects tended to be confused more often than nonlocal dialects, although this effect was attenuated by geographic mobility.This work was supported by NIH NIDCD T32 Training Grant DC00012 and NIH NIDCD R01 Research Grant DC0111 to Indiana University. The authors would like to thank Robert Nosofsky for his assistance with the statistical analyses. The first author (C. G. Clopper) is now at the Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208.

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.