The way in which language changes diffuse over space—geolinguistic diffusion—is a central problem of both historical linguistics and dialectology. Trudgill (1974) proposed that distance, population, and linguistic similarity are crucial factors in determining diffusion patterns. His hierarchical gravity model has made correct predictions about diffusion from London to East Anglia, but has never been tested across a national boundary. The aim of this article is to do so using data from both sides of the U.S.–Canada border. Two cases are examined: the non-diffusion of phonetic features from Detroit to Windsor and the gradual infiltration into Canadian English of American foreign (a) pronunciations. In both cases, the model makes incorrect predictions. In the first case, it is suggested that the model needs a term representing a border effect, and that the diffusion of phonetic features is constrained by structural, phonological factors; in the second, a traditional wave theory of diffusion appears to fit the data more closely than a hierarchical model.

This article studies palatalization gestures in the production of /t/ and /d/ in standard Belgium French through the use of electropalatography. The articulatory results are compared with an acoustic study of the affricated realization of these consonants when followed by /i/, /y/, /j/, and /[inverted h]/ in Quebec French (Bento, 1993). The study examines regional and individual differences in palatalization gestures to show how affrication can be ascribed to palatalization. Results are analyzed with regard to temporal, articulatory (electropalatography), and voicing aspects to compare production strategies across French variants, speakers, and phonetic contexts. The aim is to understand coordination processes, which are explained in terms of biomechanical constraints resulting from the coordination of adjacent gestures. These processes are used to show how palatalization traces in a variant with no recognized affrication (Belgium French) are similar in nature to the affrication in Quebec French, because palatalization is due to the coarticulation of the stop with a following high front vowel or a palatal approximant. Results are also compared with diachronic data to propose explanations for some patterns in the development from Latin to French.

This study provides acoustic evidence that in the last 50 years New Zealand English (NZE) has undergone a substantial vowel shift. Two sets of data are studied: the Otago corpus, recorded in 1995, and the Mobile Unit corpus, recorded in 1948. Both corpora have male and female speakers. The corpora were labeled, accented vowels were extracted, and formant values were calculated. The results of the formant analysis from the two corpora are contrasted. We provide evidence that in NZE /i/ has centralized, /e/ and /æ/ have raised, and the diphthongs /i[inverted e]/ and /e[inverted e]/ have merged. We argue that /i/ changed in quality not only because of crowding in the front vowel space, but also because it would be less likely misperceived as an unaccented vowel (i.e., as [inverted e]).

The distribution of variants of the face and goat vowels in Tyneside English (TE) is assessed with reference to the age, sex, and social class of 32 adult TE speakers. The effects of phonological context and speaking style are also examined. Patterns in the data are suggestive of dialect leveling, whereby localized speech variants become recessive and pronunciations typical of a wider geographical area are adopted. Within this broad pattern, however, there is evidence of parallelism between the vowels in terms of the relative proportions of their variants across speaker groups. It is suggested that pressure to maintain the symmetrical structure of the underlying phonological system is guiding this process. Labov's (1991, 1994) principles of chain shift are discussed in this connection. However, it is argued that the patterns in the data are more plausibly explained by considering the social significance of each variant instead of making reference to variants as socially neutral expressions of abstract phonological categories.