Although orientation towards local norms is increasing in Singapore, Singapore English (SgE) is still perceived by some as a nonnative variety. Variation in attitudes towards SgE may shape acquisition of SgE features by both Singaporean and expatriate children, who increasingly attend government schools. The present study investigates how the -t/d deletion patterns of 60 children reflect their attitudes and school setting. Significant correlations are observed between deletion rate, attitude towards SgE, and accent self-perception among Singaporean children, highlighting that this variety is undergoing endonormative stabilization. However, while some expatriates in local schools delete more than peers in international schools, expatriate children generally do not acquire local -t/d deletion rates or constraints, regardless of familiarity with SgE or attitudes towards the variety. This gap between locals and expatriates reflects the persistence of ideologies that delegitimize SgE, as well as the growing prominence of SgE as a marker of local identity.

This paper examines the nature of the dependency between the availability of null subjects and the “richness” of verbal subject agreement, known as Taraldsen's Generalisation (Adams, 1987; Rizzi, 1986; Roberts, 2014; Taraldsen, 1980). We present a corpus-based quantitative model of the syncretization of verbal subject agreement spanning the Medieval French period and evaluate two hypotheses relating agreement and null subjects: one relating the two as reflexes of the same grammatical property and a variational learning-based hypothesis whereby phonology-driven syncretization of agreement marking creates a learning bias against the null subject grammar. We show that only the latter approach has the potential to reconcile the intuition behind Taraldsen's Generalisation with the fact that it has proven nontrivial to formulate the notion of agreement richness in a way that would unequivocally predict whether a language has null subjects.

This study focuses on speakers who continue to use forms that are recessive in a community, and the phonological and conversational contexts in which recessive forms persist. Use of a local, recessive form is explored across males from four ex-mining communities in Northeast England. Older speakers, who lived in the area when the mines were open, frequently produce the localized variant of the mouth vowel, especially in speech produced during conversation about the locally resonant topic of mining, and, most frequently, in communities closest to the location with which the form is associated. Conversely, speakers born since the loss of mining and with little connection to the industry hardly produce the local form in any community or conversational topic. Exploring conversational topic provides evidence for the connections between shifting social contexts and sound change, specifically that speakers retain otherwise recessive features in speech concerning topics which are locally resonant to them.

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.

We analyze the dynamics of dialect loss in a cluster of villages in rural northern Russia based on a corpus of transcribed interviews, the Ustja River Basin Corpus. Eleven phonological and morphological variables are analyzed across 33 speakers born between 1922 and 1996 in a series of logistic regression models. We propose three characteristics for a comparison of the rate of loss of different variables: initial level, steepness, and turning point. We show that the dynamics of loss differs significantly across variables and discuss possible reasons for such differences, including perceptual salience, initial variation in the dialect, and convergence with regionally or socially defined varieties of Russian. In conclusion, we discuss the pros and cons of logistic regression as an approach to quantitative modeling of dialect loss. Our paper contributes to the study and documentation of Russian dialects, most of which are on the verge of extinction.