New York City English (NYCE) and New Orleans English (NOE) demonstrate remarkable similarity for cities located 1300 miles apart. Though the question of whether these dialects feature a shared history has fueled papers on the subject (Berger, 1980; Labov, 2007), there remain a number of issues with the historical record that prevent researchers from arriving at a consensus (Eble, 2016). This article presents linguistic evidence from constraint ranking comparisons of variable nonrhoticity and bought-raising in comparable contemporary samples of NYCE and NOE speakers. Findings demonstrate strikingly similar systems for (r), but dissimilar systems for bought-raising. We examine the results of our analyses in the context of evidence from previous comparisons of NYCE and NOE, concluding that the resemblance between the two dialects is likely due to diffusion from New York City to New Orleans, occurring in the 19th century before bought-raising emerged in either variety.

This paper examines the effects of housing segregation on variation in the vowel systems of young speakers of Swedish who have grown up in different neighborhoods of Gothenburg. Significant differences are found for variants of the variables /i:/ and /y:/, which are strongly associated with the local dialect; these two vowels also exhibit coherence. Another vowel pair, /ε:/ and /ø:/, are involved in a coherent leveling process affecting many of the central Swedish dialects but differing in degree of openness in different neighborhoods of Gothenburg. The results show that the variation is not simply a reflection of foreign background, nor of groups of youth adopting single variants; rather, a number of social factors conflate in housing segregation, which interferes with the transmission of more abstract aspects of the local dialect's vowel system to young speakers in certain neighborhoods.

The existence of an allophonic split between raised onsets before voiceless consonants and more open onsets in other environments is well-established for the vowels in the price lexical set. It has also been observed—less frequently—for the vowels in the mouth lexical set. We provide evidence of this allophonic raising split in the English spoken on the Isles of Scilly (a group of islands off the southwest coast of England) where the pattern is more robust for mouth than price. We propose that the allophonic raising split on Scilly is the outcome of dialect contact and natural phonetic tendencies, as observed elsewhere. However, by reflecting on the specifics of the location studied, and drawing on a perception study, we hypothesise that the trajectory of the pattern may be the consequence of the different social and regional qualities indexed by mouth and price and the interaction of these meanings with ideologies about Scilly and its speakers.

In many varieties of African American English (AAE), glottal stop replacement and deletion of word-final /t/ and /d/ results in consonant neutralization, while the underlying voicing distinction may be maintained by other cues, such as vowel duration. Here, I examine the relationship between vowel duration, final glottal stop replacement, and deletion of word-final /t, d/ to determine whether the phonological contrast of consonant voicing is maintained through duration of the preceding vowel. Data come from conversational interviews of AAE speakers in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington, DC. Results indicate that glottalization and deletion of word-final /t/ and /d/ are widespread across the speakers in the analysis. Additionally, the duration of vowels is significantly longer before underlying /d/ than /t/ for consonant neutralized contexts, thus showing that duration, normally a secondary cue to final voicing, may be becoming a primary cue in AAE.

This study explores variability in particle placement across nine varieties of English around the globe, utilizing data from the International Corpus of English and the Global Corpus of Web-based English. We introduce a quantitative approach for comparative sociolinguistics that integrates linguistic distance metrics and predictive modeling, and use these methods to examine the development of regional patterns in grammatical constraints on particle placement in World Englishes. We find a high degree of uniformity among the conditioning factors influencing particle placement in native varieties (e.g., British, Canadian, and New Zealand English), while English as a second language varieties (e.g., Indian and Singaporean English) exhibit a high degree of dissimilarity with the native varieties and with each other. We attribute the greater heterogeneity among second language varieties to the interaction between general L2 acquisition processes and the varying sociolinguistic contexts of the individual regions. We argue that the similarities in constraint effects represent compelling evidence for the existence of a shared variable grammar and variation among grammatical systems is more appropriately analyzed and interpreted as a continuum rather than multiple distinct grammars.