This paper introduces a method for the analysis of regional linguistic variation. The method identifies individual and common patterns of spatial clustering in a set of linguistic variables measured over a set of locations based on a combination of three statistical techniques: spatial autocorrelation, factor analysis, and cluster analysis. To demonstrate how to apply this method, it is used to analyze regional variation in the values of 40 continuously measured, high-frequency lexical alternation variables in a 26-million-word corpus of letters to the editor representing 206 cities from across the United States.

This article presents a systematic analysis of morphosyntactic variation in London English, investigating was/were variation in the speech of adolescents and elderly speakers in a multicultural inner London area and a less diverse outer London area. In outer London, dialect leveling to a mixed was/weren't system is well underway, as in many other areas of the U.K. Negative weren't is frequent and a grammaticalized invariant weren't it tag is developing. In inner London, variation in adolescent speech is strongly influenced by ethnicity, resulting in a lower overall frequency of was leveling and, in negative contexts, a mixed pattern of leveling to both wasn't and weren't. The patterns of variation of Anglo “heritage” inner London adolescents differ both from elderly speakers in the same area and from their peers in outer London. Our analysis confirms the need for socially realistic models of language change that take account of the social diversity of large multicultural urban cities.

English coronal stop deletion is constrained by the preceding segment, so that stops and sibilants favor deletion more than liquids and nonsibilant fricatives. Previous explanations of this constraint (e.g., the sonority hierarchy) have failed to account for the details, but we show that it can be comprehensively treated as a consequence of the obligatory contour principle (OCP). The OCP, introduced to account for a variety of categorical constraints against adjacent identical tones, segments, and so forth, can be generalized as a universal disfavoring of sequences of like features: *[αF] [αF]. Therefore, coronal stop deletion, which targets the set of segments /t, d/ defined by the features [−son, −cont, +cor], is favored when the preceding segment shares any of these features. But this requires adopting the assumption of inherent variability and interpreting the OCP as a probabilistic constraint with cumulative effects (the more shared features, the greater likelihood of deletion). This suggests an attractive theoretical integration of categorical and variable processes in the grammar.

The migration of people to the Sunbelt in the United States constitutes a major demographic shift, but has received little attention from language variationists. In Texas, this migration has led to a split of the Anglo population of the state into two dialects, a rural dialect and a metropolitan dialect. Evidence from a random-sample survey of Texas and from a systematic set of surveys of high schools in the state shows that young rural Anglos preserve two stereotypical features of the Texas accent, monophthongal /ai/, as in night, and lowered onsets of /e/, as in day, while young Anglos from metropolitan centers lack these features. This difference, which is absent among middle-aged and older native Texan Anglos, appears to have resulted from the fact that in-migration from other parts of the country is concentrated in metropolitan centers, especially suburbs.

A major issue in the study of language change is the degree to which individual speakers participate in ongoing linguistic changes as these progress over time. In this study, we examine the hypothesis, suggested by research based on the apparent-time model, that in any given period most people are neither progressive nor conservative with regard to ongoing changes, but rather fall between these polarities. Our data come from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, which spans over 270 years. A computational model was developed to establish which language users were progressive and which conservative with respect to several ongoing changes that progressed in real time between the early 15th and late 17th centuries. The changes studied ranged from morpheme replacements to more abstract structural patterns. Our results indicate that the degree to which language users participated in changes in progress depended on the type of language change analyzed, the stage of development of the change, and the rate of diffusion of the process over time. The model also enabled the identification of groups of leaders of linguistic change in Tudor and Stuart England.

A quantitative analysis of -t,-d deletion in contemporary British English reveals that preceding and following phonological contexts are significant, indicating that there is a universal constraint on -t,-d deletion consistent with universal phonetic and phonological properties of segments. However, in contrast to previous research, morphological class is not significant. Furthermore, our results do not support the hypothesis that -t,-d deletion is a variable rule that applies both lexically and postlexically. In sum, -t,-d deletion is a robust phenomenon in contemporary British English, but there are striking differences between British and North American varieties. Such differences suggest that -t,-d deletion is an ideal case study for further investigation of the phonology-phonetics interface, and adds to the available evidence from which an explanatory account of -t,-d deletion can be constructed.The first author acknowledges with gratitude the generous support of the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom (the ESRC) for research grant #R000238287, Grammatical Variation and Change in British English: Perspectives from York. We are also grateful to Ms. Heather A. Davies, who made it possible for us to work for a time in the same geographical location, as a result of which our original conception of the article was transformed. We would like to thank members of the phonetics/phonology research group at the University of York and our audiences at the following conferences for their comments and suggestions: VIEW 2000, University of Essex; NWAV 30, North Carolina State University, 2001; and the Biennial Meeting of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2002. Our anonymous reviewers deserve special mention as their insights prompted exacting revisions to our original manuscript. The result, we believe, is a stronger article; however, if points of contention remain, we welcome further discussion.

The study of the 2700 occurrences of phrase-terminal extension particles (e.g., tout ça ‘all that’, des affaires de même ‘things like that’) in two large corpora of Montréal French reveals that they are typically formed of some combination of a quantifier, a generic and a comparative, and that the particle is optionally prefaced by a connector (the conjunctions puis, et ‘and’, ou ‘or’). The 76 particle types (not counting minor variations) also include a good number of fixed forms (e.g., et cetera) often having an onomatopoeic aspect (e.g., patati patata). Extension particles can be characterized through prosodic, syntactic, and semantic criteria. The analysis bears on the sociodemographic conditioning of overall rates of particle use; of choices within the quantifier, generic, and comparative categories; and of preference for each of four major classes of particle: those containing a universal quantifier, those containing an existential quantifier, those consisting of just a generic and a comparative, and fixed forms. The discourse insertion of the four classes is also analyzed in terms of connector, type of discourse transition, the complexity of the term(s) semantically “extended” by the particle, and the discourse genre. The clearest result pertaining to overall rates of use is an age-grading effect, whereby speakers use fewer particles as they grow older. Within the components, women use more quantifiers than men, and both generics and comparatives are sharply stratified by social class and age. The reconstituted particles tend to favor certain co-occurrence patterns and avoid others more than could be predicted from the component distributions, consistent with a stylistic concord effect. As for the four classes of particle, it is the presence and nature of the connector that have the strongest effects, where puis contrasts with both ou and the null connector, while the complexity of the extended term distinguishes among the classes both by virtue of the number of terms and their syntactic complexity. As is predictable from functional considerations the sociodemographic factors do not contrast the two semantically most distinct classes, involving universal versus existential quantifiers. The linguistic validity of the four classes is confirmed by the fact that their quantitative conditioning is not predictable from the strong sociodemographic conditioning of their component elements, but rather reflects their differential suitability for various discourse functions.

The organizing concept behind dialect variation is still seen predominantly as the areas within which similar varieties are spoken. The opposing view—that dialects are organized in a continuum without sharp boundaries—is likewise popular. This article introduces a new element into the discussion, which is the opportunity to view dialectal differences in the aggregate. We employ a dialectometric technique that provides an additive measure of pronunciation difference: the (aggregate) pronunciation distance. This allows us to determine how much of the linguistic variation is accounted for by geography. In our sample of 27 Dutch towns and villages, the variation ranges between 65% and 81%, which lends credence to the continuum view. The borders of well-established dialect areas nonetheless show large deviations from the expected aggregate pronunciation distance. We pay particular attention to a puzzle concerning the subjective perception of continua introduced by Chambers and Trudgill (1998): a traveller walking in a straight line from village to village notices successive small changes, but seldom, if ever, observes large differences. This sounds like a justification of the continuum view, but there is an added twist. Might the traveller be misled by the perspective of most recent memory? We use the Chambers–Trudgill puzzle to organize our argument at several points.

The Levenshtein dialect distance method has proven to be a successful method for measuring phonetic distances between Dutch dialects. The aim of the present investigation is to validate the Levenshtein dialect distance with perceptual data from a language area other than the Dutch, namely Norway. We calculate the correlation between the Levenshtein distances and the distances between 15 Norwegian dialects as judged by Norwegian listeners. We carry out this analysis to see the degree to which the average Levenshtein distances correspond to the psychoacoustic perception of the speakers of the dialects.The present article reports on part of a study supported by NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. We are grateful for the permission from Kristian Skarbø and Jørn Almberg to use their material and for the help of Jørn Almberg during the whole investigation. We thank Saakje van Dellen for her obliging help with the data entry and Peter Kleiweg for letting us use the programs that he developed for the visualization of the maps and dendrograms in this article. Finally, we would like to thank John Nerbonne for valuable comments and for correcting our English.

This study traces the diachronic trajectory and synchronic behavior of English-origin items in Quebec French over a real-time period of 61 years. We test three standard assumptions about such foreign incorporations: (1) they increase in frequency; (2) they originate as code-switches and are gradually integrated into recipient-language grammar; and (3) the processes underlying code-switching and borrowing are the same. Results do not support the assumptions. Few other-language items persist, let alone increase. Linguistic integration is abrupt, not gradual. Speakers consistently distinguish lone other-language items from multiword fragments on each of five linguistic diagnostics tested. They borrow the former, and code-switch the latter. Code-switches are not converted into borrowings; instead the decision to code-switch or borrow is made at the moment the other-language item is accessed. We explore the implications of these findings for understanding the processes by which other-language incorporations achieve the status of native items and their consequences for theories of code-switching and borrowing.

Recent work in the acquisition of dialect has shown that children acquire patterns of stable variation and completed sound changes at a very early age. The present study looks at the acquisition of new sound changes by 3- and 4-year-old children. The results were consistent with previous findings in that, with critical exceptions, the children had acquired the changes. These results underscore the point that the dialect transmission period begins early – before the age of maximal peer group influence. In addition, as Labov (1994) suggested, one possible explanation for the frequent finding that women lead in changes from below is the asymmetry of the early childcare situation, which could advance female-dominated changes. The finding that children begin to learn their community norms at a very early age supports the possibility that this childcare asymmetry affects the progress of sound changes over time.

For the past fifty years, sociolinguistic studies of linguistic change have focused mainly on phonological variables, but recently some attention has been paid to other features, particularly discourse features used by younger speakers that may change within a relatively brief period. This article deals with the appearance of an unusual intensifier “pure” in the speech of adolescents in Glasgow, Scotland. This usage suggests that the Glasgow working-class adolescents have developed a set of norms for their speech community that owes little to adult or outside influence. Grammaticalization is a process that is normally investigated on the basis of historical documents but recent developments in methodology provide an opportunity to explore changes in progress. Intensifiers have historically been unstable and there is evidence that teenagers have recently been developing their own preferences for such items. The range of uses that the Glasgow adolescents have developed for pure suggests a process of grammaticalization that may still be in progress.The project in which the recordings were made was supported by ESRC grant no. R000239757. I am deeply indebted to Jane Stuart-Smith for providing the transcripts and allowing me to make use of them for this article. The sessions were arranged and conducted by the research assistant on the project, Claire Timmins. It is clear from the transcripts that part of the success of the project was the result of her good rapport with the adolescents. There are many joking references to her in the sessions, although the adolescents knew that she would hear these remarks. All the names in the transcripts have been replaced with pseudonyms. I am grateful for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper from Elizabeth Traugott, Lee Munroe, and the anonymous reviewers for LVC.

Studies of concord variation in English have found subject-verb concord to be particularly low in existential sentences such as There's bridges. Noting that these sentences are unusual because the subject NP is postverbal and is generally indefinite, we hypothesized that the unusual concord variation pattern was a result of structural differences associated with the restriction on the type of determiners preceding the postverbal NP. Using variationist methodology, we analyzed natural speech data from 31 speakers of standard Canadian English and found an overwhelming preference for singular agreement in existentials. Contrary to our predictions, this was not linked to a determiner-based structural distinction, but rather to the form of the copula (i.e., full or clitic) and the speaker's level of education. Our findings have implications for those theoretical studies of existentials that assume concord, because the effect of education suggests that this assumption reflects the bias of the higher educational level of the researchers.

For the past twenty-five years, the results of most sociolinguistic research suggest productive changes serve as social indices, uniting and dividing groups of speakers by gender, class, ethnicity, and so forth (Eckert, 1988, 2000; Labov, 1994, 2000; Milroy, 1980; Trudgill, 1974). Although the reoccurrence of patterned use of linguistic variants by different groups within communities appears to suggest a paralinguistic social function for variation, the effect of low-level phonetic variation on the perception of social traits is still relatively unexplored. To this end, the current article is an attempt to study speakers' perceptual awareness and social evaluation of specific vowel variants using acoustically manipulated speech samples. For the study, guises of the same speaker were manipulated according to Southern and Northern regional shifts to determine whether such differences function as perceptual cues for listeners. Although experimental in design, this study provides a method of measuring speakers' sensitivity to slight changes in formant position and attempts to determine whether such subtle phonetic changes are indeed used as socially salient categorization cues by speakers.This research has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation Linguistics Program BCS #0132145.

T/d deletion is one of the most widely studied variables in sociolinguistic research, and findings demonstrate universal morphological and phonological constraints across a range of dialects. Research into the acquisition of this variable suggests that articulatory constraints are learned first, followed by grammatical, and finally stylistic and social constraints. Dialect-specific constraints are also found, implicating the caregiver in the process of acquisition. In this article, we contribute to this research on the acquisition of t/d through the examination of the speech of preschool children in interaction with their primary caregivers in a community in Scotland. Our results mirror previous results on how and when particular constraints are acquired, providing further evidence for universal order of acquisition of this form. We also demonstrate dialect-specific constraints on use that can be mapped directly to caregiver speech. This provides additional evidence on how variable forms are transmitted from parent to child in these early stages.

This study contributes to innovation and diffusion models by examining phonetic changes in London English. It evaluates Sapir's notion of “drift,” which involves “natural,” unconscious change, in relation to these changes. Investigating parallel developments in two related varieties of English enables drift to be tested in terms of the effect of extralinguistic factors. The diphthongs of price, mouth, face, and goat in both London and New Zealand English are characterized by “Diphthong Shift,” a process that continued unabated in New Zealand. A new, large data set of London speech shows Diphthong Shift reversal, providing counterevidence for drift. We discuss Diphthong Shift and its “reversal” in relation to innovation, diffusion, leveling, and supralocalization, arguing that sociolinguistic factors and dialect contact override natural Diphthong Shift. Studying dialect change in a metropolis, with its large and linguistically innovative minority ethnic population, is of the utmost importance in understanding the dynamics of change.

In this study, we consider variation in a class of signs in Australian and New Zealand Sign Languages that includes the signs think, name, and clever. In their citation form, these signs are specified for a place of articulation at or near the signer's forehead or above, but are sometimes produced at lower locations. An analysis of 2667 tokens collected from 205 deaf signers in five sites across Australia and of 2096 tokens collected from 138 deaf signers from three regions in New Zealand indicates that location variation in these signs reflects both linguistic and social factors, as also reported for American Sign Language (Lucas, Bayley, & Valli, 2001). Despite similarities, however, we find that some of the particular factors at work, and the kinds of influence they have, appear to differ in these three signed languages. Moreover, our results suggest that lexical frequency may also play a role.

This paper hypothesizes that as an expression becomes more frequent in one grammatical context, its mental retrievability improves, which in turn makes it more easily available in different yet closely related (analogous) grammatical contexts. Such a mechanism can account for the progression of gradual change. The hypothesis generates two testable predictions. First, innovative constructions should be more likely to emerge if their analogical models are better entrenched. Second, an expression's retrievability can also be improved by priming, which in the short term should have a similar effect to entrenchment. These predictions are tested against the development of the noun key into an adjective (as in a very key argument). The change is gradual, starting with increased productivity of compounds with key as specifying element, leading later to debonded and clearly adjectival uses. The development of key is analyzed using data from the British Houses of Parliament. The effect of entrenchment is tested against individual variation. Next, situations are investigated where key has been primed, either by an earlier instance of key or by a collocate of key. The evidence supports the hypothesis. Innovative uses of key are favored under conditions that improve the retrievability of its more conventionalized uses.

This paper focuses on the way that local social indexicality interacts with principles of vowel change. A combination of real and apparent time data from the northern English dialect of York indicate fronting of tense back vowels in the goat and goose lexical sets, and diphthongization of traditionally monophthongal mid-vowels in the face and goat lexical sets. The latter process of change, a northward diffusion of more prestigious southern forms, has been noted for some other northern English dialects, but has not been described acoustically in published work. We show that these two vowel changes have different social meanings in the community. As is the case in previous studies, goat and goose fronting is not strongly associated with different speaker groups in the community. Monophthongal realizations of face and goat, on the other hand, are strongly associated with the speech of the local community, especially working-class speech. The results align with predictions of Labov's (1994) principle III of vowel change in that they show that goose fronting precedes goat fronting. However, we argue that a full understanding of the trajectories of change requires attention to social indexical properties of these variants as well. In particular, the scarcity of fronted variants of monophthongal goat is explained as a consequence of local indexing of such forms.

An increasing number of sociolinguists are using mixed effects models, models which allow for the inclusion of both fixed and random predicting variables. In most analyses, random effect intercepts are treated as a by-product of the model; they are viewed simply as a way to fit a more accurate model. This paper presents additional uses for random effect intercepts within the context of two case studies. Specifically, this paper demonstrates how random intercepts can be exploited to assist studies of speaker style and identity and to normalize for vocal tract size within certain linguistic environments. We argue that, in addition to adopting mixed effect modeling more generally, sociolinguists should view random intercepts as a potential tool during analysis.