This article is based on an extensive panel study wherein the real-time progress of several language changes was mapped over a period of ten years. Our study suggests that categorical linguistic features are inclined to remain categorical in the idiolect. If a speaker, as a child, “learns” a feature with little or no variation in it, no major changes are likely to take place during the speaker's lifetime. In other words, new changes rarely commence in an idiolect later in life. If, however, a speaker adopts a feature as a variable one, with two or more truly competing variants, it is possible that the balance of the variants will shift during the speaker's lifetime. The more equal the proportions of the rivalling variants are, the more likely it is that one of the variants will gain dominancy during the speaker's lifetime.The present study has been partially funded by the Academy of Finland. For assistance we thank the staff of the Virrat Project at the University of Tampere, Finland.

This article aims to contribute new data on periphrastic did by systematically examining its behavior in two varieties of English: Somerset English (SMT), a variety spoken in Southwest England, and Samaná English (SAM), a variety spoken in the Samaná peninsula of the Dominican Republic. We hope to contribute a broader historical and cross-dialectal perspective for understanding the origin and function of periphrastic did in nonstandard varieties of English. We focus on the linguistic contexts of its occurrence from the diachronic and synchronic literature. The results show that periphrastic did is conditioned by a number of constraints, which can be traced throughout the history of the English language, as well as some constraints from English-based creoles. Interpreting these results reveals that the similarities between the two varieties are the result of linguistic diffusion.We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of Great Britain for a DPhil studentship to Jones (R42200034220), as well as the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for Tagliamonte's doctoral fellowship. We would like to acknowledge the University of Ottawa's Sociolinguistics Laboratory, under the direction of Shana Poplack, where the research for the Samaná English corpus was originally carried out for Tagliamonte's PhD dissertation. We would also like to thank Anthony Warner for important comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this analysis and our reviewers who provided invaluable input. We dedicate this article to the speakers of the new Somerset English corpus, who contributed the data on which this study is based.

This article investigates the sociolinguistic distribution of palatalization in Uruguayan Portuguese (UP), based on data collected in a bilingual town on the Uruguayan–Brazilian border. It shows that palatalization of /di/ /ti/ has entered UP as a result of recent urbanization, which has allowed greater reception of and sensitivity to urban Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Following the tradition of variationist studies, this study identifies internal and external variables that determine the distribution of palatalization in the community, and argues that the groups that acquire BP do so as a reflection of an urban orientation, different from the border cultural and linguistic tradition. Qualitative data support the idea that this process is indirectly accelerated by exposure to Brazilian television, which provides a linguistic model for the groups that seek one. This is a new interpretation, in that previous studies have claimed that UP, as an oral minority language, is monostylistic dialect with no linguistic model.Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at the 2001 American Association of Applied Linguistics and 2002 NWAVE meetings.

This research explores the extent to which the speech of Appalachian migrants in Ypsilanti, Michigan has been affected by the emerging local norm, an ongoing dialect change labeled the Northern Cities Shift (NCS). Recorded speech from these migrants was acoustically analyzed to determine whether the NCS feature of low-front vowel raising of was present. Index scores derived from formant values were then subjected to statistical analysis to determine the degree to which the respondents' use of this vowel reflects participation in the NCS. The respondents' use or nonuse of this feature was correlated with their sex, social status, age, and social network characteristics to determine which, if any, have influenced respondents' participation, or lack of participation, in the NCS. The results show that social network and sex are statistically significant predictors of acquisition, or lack of acquisition, of the feature in question, whereas age and socioeconomic status are not.This research is part of a National Science Foundation Grant titled “Accommodation in Language Variation and Change.” This research owes much to the support and commitment of Dennis Preston. I am also grateful to Diane Aleksa, Annabelle Mooney, and anonymous reviewers who provided valuable input on earlier versions of this article.