This paper analyzes td-deletion, the process whereby coronal stops /t, d/ are deleted after a consonant at the end of the word (e.g., best, kept, missed) in the speech of 93 speakers from Manchester, stratified for age, social class, gender, and ethnicity. Prior studies of British English have not found the morphological effect—more deletion in monomorphemic mist than past tense missed—commonly observed in American English. We find this effect in Manchester and provide evidence that the rise of glottal stop replacement in postsonorant position in British English (e.g., halt, aunt) may be responsible for the reduction in the strength of this effect in British varieties. Glottaling blocks deletion, and, because the vast majority of postsonorant tokens are monomorphemic, the higher rates of monomorpheme glottaling dampens the typical effect of deletion in this context. These findings indicate organization at a higher level of the grammar, while also showing overlaid effects of factors such as style and word frequency.

This article examines the transfer of (TH)-fronting, a phonological feature of African American English, into the speech of white speakers from South Philadelphia. While most cases of linguistic diffusion, particularly of African American English, are found in speakers with a positive affiliation with the source dialect (e.g., Bucholtz, 1999; Cutler, 1999; Fix, 2010), here the white adopters of (TH)-fronting exhibit overtly hostile attitudes toward black neighbors. I argue that (TH)-fronting has been adopted as an index of street or masculinity by the white speakers in this study. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the phonological constraints on borrowed (TH)-fronting have been restricted and simplified from the constraints in the source dialect. Finally, I discuss how hostile interactions may play a role in language change, allowing change in dialects not only to proceed in tandem across unexpected boundaries (e.g., Milroy & Milroy, 1985), but also to be directly diffused across hostile boundaries.

Although the sound system of Indian English has been the object of numerous publications over the years, there has been a remarkable scarcity of variationist sociolinguistic research carried out on the topic. The present study addresses this gap by describing the short front vowels of 22 lifelong English-speaking Delhi residents born between 1948 and 1992. Focusing more specifically on variation in the relative configuration of trap /æ/, dress /ɛ/, and kit /ɪ/, the study provides apparent-time evidence for a series of interrelated changes affecting the system. Those include an ongoing lowering of /æ/ and /ɛ/, as well as age-related variation in a previously unreported allophonic split of /ɪ/. I argue that these apparent-time patterns are amenable to an analysis in terms of chain shift, and I discuss the implications of such a claim, linking the phenomenon described to similar patterns reported in various other parts of the English-speaking world.

The St. Louis Corridor extending from Chicago, Illinois to St. Louis, Missouri has been described as a “breach” through the Midlands dialect region because of the presence of Inland North features there. Most notably, features associated with the Northern Cities Shift suddenly appeared in Corridor cities in the mid-twentieth century, but they have since largely retreated. Friedman's (2014) population study has uncovered complex relationships between the Corridor's geography and this pattern of advance and retreat, and this work elaborates on that investigation through computational simulations of the Corridor's population structure. Implementing a new network-analytic population model (Kodner & Cerezo Falco, 2018), I find support for Friedman's original hypothesis that migration into cities along Route 66 imported Inland North features into the Corridor first before it spread outward to communities farther away from the route and uncover questions about the Corridor's population that merit further study.

This study examines the short-a system in Greater New Orleans (GNO) following the demographic changes and large-scale displacement that occurred after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I provide a linguistic description of the short-a systems of 57 residents of the GNO suburb of Chalmette, half of whom relocated after the storm, and half of whom returned to their pre-Katrina homes. While many speakers demonstrate robust split systems, analysis demonstrates a shift over time toward the nasal system common throughout much of the US. Whether participants returned or relocated was not a significant predictor of short-a system; however, speakers most oriented to places outside of Chalmette may have led the change in progress, pointing to the importance of considering place orientation in contexts of speaker mobility. This study establishes that adoption of the nasal system is well underway in GNO, generating further questions about what New Orleans English will sound like as post-Katrina changes continue to develop.