This paper discusses the regional variation in four ongoing sound changes in the Dutch vowels /eː,øː,oː,ɛi,œy/ that are conditioned by a following coda /l/. The synchronic diatopic diffusion of these changes is charted using the Dutch teacher corpus, a comprehensive dataset containing word-list data from four regions in The Netherlands and four in Flanders. Comparisons are made of the five vowels preceding nonapproximant consonants and preceding coda /l/. To avoid manually segmenting the oftentimes highly gradient vowel–/l/ boundary, GAMMs are used to model whole formant trajectories. Comparisons are then made of trajectories and of peaks of trajectories. The results are used to classify the nature of the four sound changes in terms of phonetic and lexical abruptness/graduality and to show that the changes are intertwined in such a way that they can only be considered as separate facets of a single, currently ongoing vowel shift.

A long /aː/ in pre-fricative and pre-nasal contexts in words such as fast, answer or after is one of the most distinctive phonological features of British RP and, to a certain extent, of Southern Hemisphere varieties of English (Trudgill 2010). The lengthening of /a/ has been particularly gaining ground from the eighteenth century onwards (Beal 1999; Jones 2006). The pronouncing dictionaries published between the eighteenth century and the present day allow us to trace its lexical diffusion (Labov 1994) across the whole lexicon. Drawing on the statistics of the ARCHER corpus, the lexical sets of the ECEP database, the full electronic edition of Walker's dictionary (1791), Wells’ Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (2008) and the Macquarie Dictionary (2015), this article examines the role played by the phonetic environment, word frequency, phonetic analogy and isolated lead words like draught or master in the spread of the lengthening of /a/. The results show that word frequency per se has no clear effect on /a/ lengthening in either pre-fricative or pre-nasal environments in eighteenth-century sources. The article also offers a possible relative chronology of the spread of that phenomenon to each phonetic environment within the bath set.

The pronunciation of the bath vowel is a salient feature of English varieties of the southwest of England, yet neither the status of the trap–bath split in traditional dialects nor ongoing change today is well understood. After reviewing the existing literature, we investigate the quality and length of low unrounded vowels in Bristol English on the basis of sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-five speakers. The picture suggested by these data is complex: there is evidence for a traditional length-only trap–bath split, for a length and backness split diffusing from the east and for a merger diffusing from the north. Some of these changes involve lexical diffusion, especially with loanwords and other distinctive lexical groups. Overall, the rich and contradictory data speak to the contested sociolinguistic status of these variables and to the need to examine individual patterns of variation closely to gain a full understanding of them.

The spread of English has created a rich array of varieties, which are often grouped into a tripartite division: the ENL, ESL, and EFL of Quirk, or the inner-circle, outer-circle, and expanding-circle of Kachru. These varieties, especially ESL, differ among themselves in both form and function. It is often assumed in the literature that these varieties are autonomous systems of communication. This article challenges this assumption by showing that the innovative phonological features of one ESL variety, the vernacular English spoken in Singapore, cannot be analyzed without reference to native English. These change-in-progress features fall into two types: those that originate in phonemes, and those that originate in words. Social stigma associated with them poses a formidable barrier to their stabilization and diffusion, and consequently to their autonomization. Nonnative English is grammatically dependent on native English.