Investigations into dialect emergence are most often based on data from manuscripts and on comparative and internal reconstructions. Seldom does the opportunity arise to monitor the selection of competing norms during the emergence stage because the data to postulate the linguistic marketplace (and hence to know what forms were likely to have been in competition) are unavailable. The case of dialect emergence in Thyborøn, Denmark, over the past century offers just this rare opportunity. A historical demographic profile from the town's census data, dating back to its inception in the 1890s, enables a comparative analysis of the input dialects and variable linguistic forms that were in competition. It is possible to trace the linguistic and social variables at play during the emergence stage of this new dialect, following the tradition of research by Omdal (1977), Dorian (1981), Trudgill (1986), and Kerswill (1994b), among others. The findings contribute to an explanatory model of dialect emergence and transformation.

The focus of this article is zero copula use in Sri Lankan English speech. Zero copula use has been at the heart of variationist studies, but has received little attention in New English studies because of its limited use in these varieties. In this article I look at zero copula in Sri Lankan English to determine whether the patterns of use parallel those of AAVE, Caribbean Creoles, or other copula studies on varieties of English including New Englishes. The theoretical issue raised in this article is whether zero copula use in Sri Lankan English can be seen as both a creole-like feature and an optional syntactic feature of those who use English a lot, but for whom it is not a native language, or as a substratal influence in language shift. The variable findings for present tense BE demonstrate that speakers of Sri Lankan English make only limited use of BE absence. BE absence appears to be optional in certain environments where Standard English would require the are copula/auxiliary. Zero copula use in Sri Lankan English speech is especially interesting because Sri Lankan English emerged from an educational background and not from a creole setting. However, the linguistic data for zero copula use in Sri Lankan English suggests that the type of complement and the preceding phonological environment play a significant role on zero copula use, which is comparable to that of other varieties of English, focusing on the study of BE absence.A shorter version of this article was presented under a different title at the Triangle Colloquium on Literature and Linguistics held at the University of Sheffield, UK on September 30, 2000. I wish to gratefully acknowledge the excellent comments and insights provided by the two journal reviewers on earlier drafts of this article. Any shortcomings that exist are my own. I would like to dedicate this work to Dr. Anthea Fraser Gupta (University of Leeds) and Prof. Siromi Fernando (University of Colombo).

This article deals with divergence on the lexical, phonological, and morphological levels in three dialects that were the same until the mid-20th century (Maaseiks in Belgium, Susters in the Netherlands, and Waldfeuchts in Germany) and that have changed under the influence of three different standard languages (Belgian Dutch, Netherlandic Dutch, and Standard German). The investigation is carried out among girls aged 14 to 16 years and women aged 35 to 50 years. Due to the unique laboratory-like situation, it was possible to gain a detailed understanding of the role of the structure of the dialect and the dialect–standard language situation in the process of dialect change under the influence of a standard language. The data indicate that the linguistic route of the change is largely the same for all dialects. This means that the receiving dialect plays an important part in the linguistic embedding of a change. However, the rationale of the linguistic road is still far from clear. The divergence of the similar dialects occurred relatively recently. Whereas the women of the three places use the old dialect forms almost exclusively, the girls use forms of the standard languages or “mixed” forms, especially in Waldfeucht. The dialect of Waldfeucht is clearly affected much more strongly by Standard German than are the dialect of Maaseik by Belgian Dutch and the dialect of Susteren by Netherlandic Dutch. This can be explained by a number of factors: the position of the dialect at school, comprehensibility of the dialect, attitude towards the dialect, and the use of the dialect.

One consistent finding across sociolinguistic studies is the tendency for female speakers to lead in ongoing change. Different explanations have been proposed for this and a key method of testing these explanations is to identify whether the pattern occurs in the languages of a wider range of societies than have been studied thus far. Historical societies are relatively understudied in this regard, but undertaking variationist research into gender in historical varieties presents many challenges. One way to overcome these is to examine variation internal to fiction data. This paper presents an analysis of the effect of gender on the adverb selected for sentential negation in Old Norse prose fiction. It finds that female characters lead consistently in this change over time. In doing so, it demonstrates the feasibility of using fiction data when examining the effect of gender in historical varieties such as Old Norse.

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.

In this article, the variable use of verbal -s with (especially, third-person) plural subjects is examined in extreme south-central Indiana. The patterns observed are compared to the same in several varieties of Appalachian English, and it is argued that the local language variety reflects the morphosyntactic stability of the linguistic system brought here by pioneer settlers from various Appalachian states some 200 years before. A very small pilot-study corpus of comparable data from the extreme northwestern corner of Indiana is called on to help refute a “universalist” explanation for the similarities found in southern Indiana and Appalachia. Finally, the conditions surrounding the transplantation of Appalachian English to Kentuckiana and to other places (i.e., the Ozarks, North Carolina's Outer Banks) are considered, and questions are raised about the degree of isolation believed to be necessary in the respective communities.

Based on a corpus of ego-documents (private letters, diaries, memoirs) from the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, this paper presents a variationist comparative study to determine the fate of the modal periphrasis haber de + infinitive in the history of modern Spanish. Detailed analysis of the envelope of variation enables us to show that, despite an abrupt decline in the selection of haber de relative to tener que, both ‘to have to’, grammatical environments that favor its use remain in the mid-20th century. Many of the factor groups and the hierarchy of constraints during this period are similar to those that operated in previous periods. Nevertheless, a generalized decrease in the explanatory power of these factor groups, as well as some divergent patterns within several of these groups are also observed, mainly as a result of the fact that haber de + infinitive is increasingly relegated to some restricted areas of the grammar and lexicon. Based on these results, some theoretical implications for changing rates and constraints in language change and grammaticalization are discussed.

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.

The existence of a shared constraint hierarchy is one of the criteria that defines and delimits speech communities. In particular, women and men are thought to differ only in their rates of variable usage, not in the constraints governing their variation; that is, women and men are typically considered to belong to the same speech community. We find that in early twentieth century Southland, New Zealand, women and men had different constraint hierarchies for rhoticity, with a community grammar of rhoticity only developing later. These results may be a product of a particular set of sociohistorical facts thatare not peculiar to Southland. We suggest that further research in other geographical locations may indeed reveal that men and women have different constraint hierarchies for other variables. Speech communities may thus be delimited along social lines in ways that have not been previously considered.

This study is part of a larger unpublished work. The data collection is based on the Labovian sociolinguistic interview: 200 randomly selected Wolof speakers were interviewed and recorded for 20 minutes in Senegal. They were divided into two groups: 100 subjects over 50 years old and 100 subjects between 20 and 30 years old. Each group comprised 50 males and 50 females. The number of loanwords from Arabic, French, and English in subjects' vernacular was statistically analyzed using the Wilcoxon (rank sums) test across three registers (cultural, political, and religious), age groups, and gender. The study argues that loanwords in Wolof reflect the social groups in Senegal and the prestige of lender-languages. First, the article discusses the influence of foreign languages in Senegal. Second, it examines the social status of loanwords from these languages. Third, it shows the relationships between loanwords, registers, age group, and gender in Senegal.

This article describes results from a subjective reaction test of Japanese speakers' attitudes toward keigo ‘polite language’. Hypotheses regarding attitudes toward “correct” language were for the most part verified, whereas attitudes toward “incorrect” forms were decidedly mixed. These results provide a first step in ascertaining attitudes toward a set of forms that are said to be in a state of flux in contemporary Japan. Also impinging on interpretation of the data are questions of descriptive terminology and culture. Such issues provide additional insight into the controversy within sociolinguistics over quantitative description and normative explanation.

This study examines the placement of an adverb with respect to a modal or perfect auxiliary in English (e.g., It might potentially escape / It potentially might escape). The data are drawn from two large, socially stratified corpora of vernacular English (Toronto, Canada, and York, England) and thus allow a cross-dialect perspective on linguistic and social correlates. Using quantitative sociolinguistic methods, I demonstrate similarity in the varieties, with the postauxiliary position generally strongly favored. Of particular importance is the structure of the auxiliary phrase; when a modal is followed by the perfect auxiliary (e.g., It might have escaped), the rates of preauxiliary adverb placement are considerably higher. As the variation is chiefly correlated with linguistic, rather than social factors, I apply recent proposals from Generative syntax to further understand the grammar of the phenomenon. However, the evidence suggests that the variability seen here is a result of postsyntactic, rather than syntactic, processes.

This article explores syntactic and regional variation in the choice between declarative (nonrelativizer) that and zero complementizer. Using a corpus of contemporary prose from New Zealand, Australian, American, and British newspapers, the study examines complementizer choice in complements to verbs and adjectives, extraposed complements to verbs, it-subject constructions (It is obvious (that)), and copula constructions (The trouble is (that), It could be (that), What matters is (that), It was only later (that)). The form of the embedded subject (pronoun, short NP (noun phrase), long NP) is also taken into account. It is shown that significant regional differences in zero rates are to some extent syntactic. The New Zealand and Australian data show less inhibition of zero in clauses that are not adjacent to the clause-selecting lexical head than the American and British data.

In this article we identify a variable context in the use of two Galician verb forms (cantei and cantara) and three Spanish verb forms used in Galicia (canté, cantara, and había cantado) with identical modal, temporal, and aspectual values: the simple past indicative. We show that the variation in question is constrained by linguistic factors, specifically pragmatic ones, and that, although the forms cantei and canté are widely preferred, contexts with low discourse focalization favor cantara and había cantado. Finally, we test this hypothesis with data from two language corpora (Galician and Galician Spanish), which are quantified and interpreted with the program VARBRUL 2S.

This paper provides a unified phonologically motivated explanation for the movement of trap, dress, and kit following the low-back merger in North American English (i.e., the Canadian Shift, California Shift, Low Back Merger Shift, Third Shift, etc.). The explanation puts forth that the three-way merger of lot, palm, and thought results in the loss of the [+Front] feature specification for trap, opening the door for dispersion focalization to pull trap toward the low central region of the vowel space. Analogy then prompts all other [−Peripheral] vowels, including strut and foot, to centralize. Crucial to this explanation is that the low-back merger includes palm, not just lot and thought. Evidence for this requirement is presented in a phonetic analysis of older speakers from conservative Victoria, British Columbia. The explanation presented here reconciles an earlier proposal (Roeder & Gardner, 2013) with Fruehwald's (2017) observation that parallel movement requires a shared feature specification.

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.

The Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS) is a major North American vowel chain shift spreading across many disparate dialect regions. In this field-based study, we examine the speech of fifty-nine White Western Massachusetts speakers, aged 18–89. Using diagnostics in Becker (2019) and Boberg (2019b), we find the LBMS emerging at the expense of the Northern Cities Shift (Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972) and traditional New England features (Boberg, 2001; Kurath, 1939; Nagy & Roberts, 2004). In Becker's LBMS model (2019:9), the low-back merger (lot-thought) triggers front-vowel shifts. Our results suggest that local social meaning can sometimes override this chronology such that the front-vowel shifts occur before the low-back merger, even as the overall configuration comes to match Becker's predictions. Sociosymbolic meaning associated with the older New England system has led to a different temporal ordering of LBMS components, thus providing new theoretical and empirical insights into the mechanisms by which supralocal patterns are adopted.

It has been claimed that the ellipsis of postpositional particles is one of the properties of Japanese women's language. The validity of this claim, however, is compromised by several methodological problems in prior research in this area: (1) the subjective comparison of bare percentages without any statistical verification of male–female differences; (2) the neglect of the intersecting relationships among a variety of potential constraints which simultaneously influence the speaker's choice of the variable; and (3) the exclusive focus on single-sex interactions. Conducting multivariate analyses of conversational data from both single-sex and cross-sex peer interactions, this preliminary study demonstrates the overgeneralization of gender-linked differentiation in past work due to the neglect of the relative strength of potential intersecting factors. The results also reveal statistically significant degrees of stylistic intragender variability across different types of gender composition, which counters the static approach to a social variable of gender in the traditional sociolinguistic paradigm.

This study examines the use of object relative pronouns by native (NS) and nonnative (NNS) speakers of Standard American English. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) relative pronoun choice by NNSs will differ from that of NSs, principally because of prescriptive grammar instruction abroad; (2) wh, that, and zero froms will be used variably by both NSs and NNSs, depending on the function of the object and the human/nonhuman status of its antecedent; and (3) increased exposure to native speaking environments will cause a shift toward NS norms of use by NNSs. Half the subjects were given a preference task and asked to mark the relative pronoun variants they would be most likely to use in speech and in writing. The other subjects were given a production task in which sentences were combined to produce relativization. The data and varbrul2 analyses supported all three hypotheses: NNSs used all forms roughly equally in speaking but preferred Wh in writing, whereas NSs favored That or no pronoun. A shift away from Wh was also evident in NNSs after extended exposure to NS English.

We investigate the impact of medium of communication (in-person versus video) on intraspeaker variation in conversation—a process we refer to as medium-shifting. To quantify the effects of medium-shifting and understand its possible motivations, we analyze three variables that show intraspeaker effects of “clear” or “careful” speech: articulation rate, density-controlled vowel space area, and (ING). The data come from matched in-person and video-mediated interviews with thirty-three repeat guests from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, recorded before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mixed-effects regression models show that compared to in-person interviews, video-mediated interviews involve a significantly lower articulation rate and larger vowel space, but no significant difference in (ING). The results suggest that speakers may engage in medium-shifting in order to enhance their intelligibility over video, for example, through more precise articulatory movements and greater contrast between phonemic vowel categories. The null effect of medium on (ING) further suggests that medium-shifting is a motivator of intraspeaker differences even within a single contextual style. An emergent extralinguistic factor affecting speaking behavior and choices, medium-shifting should be carefully considered especially when designing variationist research involving mixed media interviews.