A number of studies of African American communities show a tendency to approximate the phonological patterns of the surrounding mainstream white community. An analysis of the vowel systems of 36 African American speakers in the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus compares their development over the 20th century with that of the mainstream community. For vowels involved in change in the white community, African Americans show very different patterns, often moving in opposite directions. The traditional split of short-a words into tense and lax categories is a more fine-grained measure of dialect relations. The degree of participation by African Americans is described by measures of bimodality, which are applied as well to the innovative nasal short-a system. The prototypical African American speakers show no bimodality in either measure, recombining the traditional tense and lax categories into a single short-a in lower mid, nonperipheral position. The lack of relation between the two short-a systems is related to the high degree of residential segregation, in that linguistic contact is largely diffusion among adults rather than the faithful transmission found among children.

In the course of its history, English underwent a significant structural change in its numeral system. The number words from 21 to 99 switched from the unit-and-ten to the ten-before-unit pattern. This change is traced on the basis of more than 800 number words. It is argued that this change, which took seven centuries to complete and in which the Old English pattern was highly persistent, can be broken down into two parts—the reordering of the units and tens and the loss of the conjoining element. Although the two steps logically belong to the same overall change, they display a remarkably disparate behavior. Whereas the reordering process affected the least frequent number words first, the deletion process affected the most frequent words first. This disparity lends support to the hypothesis that the involvement or otherwise of low-level aspects of speech determines the role of frequency in language change (Phillips, 2006). Finally, the order change is likely to be a contact-induced phenomenon and may have been facilitated by a reduction in mental cost.

Four vowel variables are investigated in the speech of 50 rural, nonmigrant children and adolescents aged 6 to 18 years in the Syrian village Oyoun Al-Wadi. Contrary to previous studies, the children initially acquire the urban and later the rural forms of these vowels. This process of acquisition shows the following. First, children show reversal in the acquisition of forms, and thus the rules associated with them; instead of acquiring the local forms first, they acquire the supralocal forms. Second, children can acquire the rules of the second dialect after the age of 8. Third, gender emerges as significant as boys and girls exhibit different linguistic behavior. Fourth, preadolescents emerge as the age group that is most active in building a social identity. Fifth, social-psychological factors motivate the shift from urban to rural forms. These include local identity, gendered social meanings of the variants, and the growth of the children's sociolinguistic competence throughout their preadolescence and adolescence.

In many rural English-speaking communities, linguistic processes such as paradigm leveling come into direct conflict with social processes of standardization. In the US region of Appalachia, an analysis of past be leveling illustrates the progression of the sociolinguistic clashes between these forces. A quantitative sociolinguistic examination of leveled was (e.g., We was there) for 67 native Appalachian speakers was conducted to assess the status of past be in light of economic and educational improvements over the 20th century. The results indicate that leveled was declined sharply, with the youngest speakers demonstrating more standardized patterns. Although the overall rate of was leveling declined across apparent time, the rate of was contraction (e.g., We's there last night) increased, offering native Appalachians a reduced variant to contest the social push toward a fully standardized system.

Traditional eastern New England (ENE) dialect features are rapidly receding in many parts of northern New England. Because this ENE shift involves seven different phonological features, it provides a prime opportunity to explore different rates of change across multiple linguistic variables at the same time in the same social setting. The present study is the first acoustic sociophonetic investigation of central New Hampshire, and it is based on new field data from 51 adult speakers. Results show that young generations are discarding many traditional ENE pronunciations in favor of leveled, nonregional forms, yet the changes are affecting some variables more quickly than others. Many distinctive traditional ENE variants (nonrhotic speech, intrusive-r, fronted father, “broad-a” in bath) are quickly receding, while others (fronted start and hoarse/horse distinction) are somewhat more conservative, being “overshadowed” by the presence of (r) as a variable within the same syllable. We frame our apparent-time analysis in terms of Sankoff's (2013a) notion of “age vectors” and Labov's (2012) “outward orientation” of the language faculty, illustrating how different generations are juggling multiple age vectors within the same overall shift, and how one variable can overshadow another variable within the same syllable.