Modern Standard Albanian is a young variety, proclaimed in 1972 at the Congress of Orthography in Tirana. It is based on the Tosk variety, one of the two main varieties (Tosk and Gheg) of the Albanian language, which is spoken in the South of the country. The aim of the current investigation is to look at the way in which this Standard is realized by its representatives, the educated speakers of four geographical regions: South Albania, Middle Albania, North Albania, and Kosovo. The analysis is based on the realization of stressed vowels. It can be shown that there are striking differences between the speakers of the Republic of Albania and Kosovo, whereas within Albania, speakers from the different geographical regions adopt characteristic features from the other geographical regions. The spread of Standard Albanian is, therefore, not solely an intrusion of the Tosk-based variety into the Gheg varieties, but rather, speakers counterbalance among their varieties on the basis of the alleged variety.This article is a considerably revised version of a presentation given at the 2nd International Conference on Language Variation in Europe at Uppsala University in June, 2003. We are grateful for the comments of participants there and especially grateful for helpful comments by Werner Deutsch and two anonymous referees.

This study provides the results of an acoustic analysis of the short front vowels in the speech of New Zealanders born between the 1890s and the 1930s. It will be shown that it is in this period in which the system of short front vowels undergoes a typological change, whereby a system of three short front vowels develops into one of two front vowels ( ) and one central vowel ( ). It will be further shown that these processes are interrelated and can justifiably be called a “chain-shift.” In addition, it will be demonstrated that centralization of postdates the raising of the other vowels, and that rates of centralization are dependent on consonantal environment.I would like to thank the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) as well as the University of Canterbury for funding the research that is discussed here. I would also like to thank Dr. Jen Hay, Professor Lyle Campbell, Dr. Margaret Maclagan, Professor Peter Trudgill, and Professor Elizabeth Gordon for their support and their insightful comments on my work. I am also indebted to Elizabeth Gordon for allowing access to the ONZE (Origins of New Zealand English) data. The intermediate period archive data was collected by Rosemary Goodyear, Lesley Evans, and members of the ONZE team. The work done by members of the ONZE Project in preparing the data, making transcripts, and obtaining background information is also acknowledged.

For fifty years after World War II, Latvia was incorporated into the former Soviet Union. Although in theory the use of regional languages was not discouraged, in practice knowledge of Russian was obligatory. Since 1991, Latvian has again become the official language, and knowledge of Russian is widespread but optional. These political events have created a natural experiment in the effects of almost universal bilingualism on a language. To assess the impact on pronunciation, native speakers of Latvian, ranging from retirement age to teens, were recorded reading a word list and a short narrative. Vowel pronunciation differed across the generations both in quantity relationships and in formant structure.Research for this project was supported by a grant from the International Research and Exchange Board, with funds provided by the U.S. Department of State (Title VII Program) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed here.

In this article we provide a quantitative view on the relationship between standard and dialect in Italy. In Italian sociolinguistics, the concept of dilalìa has been used to account for this kind of linguistic repertoire. This notion will be addressed as the main theoretical frame to our investigation on code choice. Italian sociolinguistics and dialectology so far have come to apparently contradictory results about the standard–dialect relationship and the vitality of dialects. On one side, the main post-war trend shows a fall in the number of dialect speakers (especially the young and the less educated); on the other, we are witnessing a change from above in attitudes and beliefs regarding dialects. We carried out an empirical study in the northwest of the country employing the method of rapid and anonymous street interactions. Our focus being on code choice, we wanted to know what factors affect the presence of dialect, making use of multivariate analysis.This research was part of a larger national project (Cofin 2002–2003) directed by Gaetano Berruto (University of Turin) with the title “Lingua e dialetto in Italia all'inizio del Terzo Millennio” (National language and dialect in Italy at the beginning of the Third Millennium) and involving the universities of Neaples, Lecce, and Rome. Both authors took part in the research unit of Turin. Although the research and the analysis of the data have been conceived and undertaken by both authors, Alessandro Vietti wrote “The results” and “Gender-based-variation” sections while all other parts were written by Silvia Dal Negro.

Recent findings have shown that listeners' region of origin and geographic mobility affect their perception of dialect-specific properties of speech in vowel identification and dialect categorization tasks. The present study examined the perceptual dialect classification performance of four groups of listeners using a six-alternative forced-choice categorization task. The residential history of the listeners was manipulated so that the four groups of listeners differed in terms of region of origin (Northern or Midland United States) and geographic mobility (Mobile or Non-Mobile). Although residential history did not significantly affect accuracy in the categorization task, both region of origin and geographic mobility were found to affect the underlying perceptual similarity structure of the different regional varieties. Geographically local dialects tended to be confused more often than nonlocal dialects, although this effect was attenuated by geographic mobility.This work was supported by NIH NIDCD T32 Training Grant DC00012 and NIH NIDCD R01 Research Grant DC0111 to Indiana University. The authors would like to thank Robert Nosofsky for his assistance with the statistical analyses. The first author (C. G. Clopper) is now at the Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208.