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.

Communicative competence comprises many things, including the ability to use the appropriate pronunciation, based on gender and style. Previous L2 research in phonology has focused on the frequency of nativelike and nonnative forms and variation within nonnative forms, rather than variation within nativelike forms. This study, however, examines variation in nativelike forms by investigating gender and stylistic differences in the English of native speakers and native speakers of Japanese and Spanish. The results of the native speakers demonstrated that there were significant differences based on gender and style. Both groups of nonnative speakers exhibited significant gender differences but only one group showed significant stylistic differences. The results suggest that gender differences are acquired before stylistic differences.Different versions of this article were delivered at the following conferences: EUROSLA, June 1999 in Lund, Sweden; NWAVE, October 1999 in Toronto, Canada; and SLRF, October 2003 in Tucson, Arizona.

This article is based on an extensive panel study wherein the real-time progress of several language changes was mapped over a period of ten years. Our study suggests that categorical linguistic features are inclined to remain categorical in the idiolect. If a speaker, as a child, “learns” a feature with little or no variation in it, no major changes are likely to take place during the speaker's lifetime. In other words, new changes rarely commence in an idiolect later in life. If, however, a speaker adopts a feature as a variable one, with two or more truly competing variants, it is possible that the balance of the variants will shift during the speaker's lifetime. The more equal the proportions of the rivalling variants are, the more likely it is that one of the variants will gain dominancy during the speaker's lifetime.The present study has been partially funded by the Academy of Finland. For assistance we thank the staff of the Virrat Project at the University of Tampere, Finland.

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 article aims to contribute new data on periphrastic did by systematically examining its behavior in two varieties of English: Somerset English (SMT), a variety spoken in Southwest England, and Samaná English (SAM), a variety spoken in the Samaná peninsula of the Dominican Republic. We hope to contribute a broader historical and cross-dialectal perspective for understanding the origin and function of periphrastic did in nonstandard varieties of English. We focus on the linguistic contexts of its occurrence from the diachronic and synchronic literature. The results show that periphrastic did is conditioned by a number of constraints, which can be traced throughout the history of the English language, as well as some constraints from English-based creoles. Interpreting these results reveals that the similarities between the two varieties are the result of linguistic diffusion.We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of Great Britain for a DPhil studentship to Jones (R42200034220), as well as the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for Tagliamonte's doctoral fellowship. We would like to acknowledge the University of Ottawa's Sociolinguistics Laboratory, under the direction of Shana Poplack, where the research for the Samaná English corpus was originally carried out for Tagliamonte's PhD dissertation. We would also like to thank Anthony Warner for important comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this analysis and our reviewers who provided invaluable input. We dedicate this article to the speakers of the new Somerset English corpus, who contributed the data on which this study is based.

This article examines the assibilation of the vibrant /-r/ in word final position in Mexican Spanish in an urban and a rural community in Moroleón (Guanajuato, Mexico) and Kennett Square (Pennsylvania, United States). The data was collected according to traditional sociolinguistic methodology during 1995 and 1996. The analysis of the data uses linguistic factors combined with socioeconomic factors that include movement seen as social mobility and/or migratory tendencies in the population. Through the intertwining of these factors interesting tendencies can be observed: female preference for the innovative and prestigious variant as a way to acquire power in a society where women do not have a voice to claim or seek social mobility and power; the influence of the linguistic market in the community, and the effects of accommodation.My thanks go to the anonymous reader who reviewed this paper. I am responsible for any shortcomings found here.

This article examines the historical evolution of subject–verb concord in New Zealand English. We investigate the usage of the singular form of be with plural NP subjects (existentials and nonexistentials) over the past 150 years. The results demonstrate that the New Zealand English subject–verb concord system has undergone considerable reorganization during this time. Singular concord in nonexistentials occurred in early New Zealand English, but is now largely absent. In existentials, it steadily declined during the late 19th century, and then reversed this trajectory to become a well established feature of modern New Zealand English. Singular concord in New Zealand English existentials is now conditioned by a range of social and linguistic factors, and largely resembles other varieties in this respect.We are indebted to the ONZE team, particularly Elizabeth Gordon, Margaret Maclagan, and everyone involved in the collection and transcription of the corpora over the years. Thanks also to the students of Ling 203 2002 for their preliminary analysis of the data and lively discussion. Helpful feedback on this paper has been provided by David Britain, Elizabeth Gordon, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, Peter Trudgill, Heidi Quinn, the audience at the New Zealand Linguistic Society conference, and three anonymous referees. The authors are listed in alphabetical order.

This article investigates the sociolinguistic distribution of palatalization in Uruguayan Portuguese (UP), based on data collected in a bilingual town on the Uruguayan–Brazilian border. It shows that palatalization of /di/ /ti/ has entered UP as a result of recent urbanization, which has allowed greater reception of and sensitivity to urban Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Following the tradition of variationist studies, this study identifies internal and external variables that determine the distribution of palatalization in the community, and argues that the groups that acquire BP do so as a reflection of an urban orientation, different from the border cultural and linguistic tradition. Qualitative data support the idea that this process is indirectly accelerated by exposure to Brazilian television, which provides a linguistic model for the groups that seek one. This is a new interpretation, in that previous studies have claimed that UP, as an oral minority language, is monostylistic dialect with no linguistic model.Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at the 2001 American Association of Applied Linguistics and 2002 NWAVE meetings.

Early linguistic experience has been shown to affect speech perception in a variety of ways. The present experiment investigated the effects of early linguistic experience on dialect perception. Two groups of participants listened to sentences read by talkers from six American English dialects and were asked to identify where they thought the talkers were from using a forced-choice categorization task. We found that “army brats,” who had lived in at least three different states, performed better than “homebodies,” who had lived only in Indiana, in terms of overall categorization accuracy. Army brats who had lived in a given region also categorized talkers from that region more accurately than army brats who had not lived there. Clustering analyses on the stimulus-response confusion matrices revealed significant differences in the perceptual similarity spaces for the two listener groups. These results suggest that early exposure to linguistic variation affects how well listeners can identify where unfamiliar talkers are from.This work was supported by the NIH-NIDCD R01 research grant DC00111 and the NIH-NIDCD T32 training grant DC00012 to Indiana University. We would like to thank Caitlin Dillon for her assistance in selecting the talkers, Luis Hernandez for his technical advice and support, Robert Nosofsky for his assistance with the clustering analysis, and Adam Tierney and Jeffrey Reynolds for their help in collecting the data.

In Atlantic Canada Acadian communities, definite on is in competition with the traditional vernacular variant je…ons (e.g., on parle vs. je parlons “we speak”), with the latter variant stable only in isolated communities, but losing ground in communities in which there is substantial contact with external varieties of French. We analyze the distribution of the two variants in two Prince Edward Island communities that differ in terms of amount of such contact. The results of earlier studies of Acadian French are confirmed in that je…ons usage remains robust in the more isolated community but is much lower in the less isolated one. However, in the latter community, the declining variant, while accounting for less than 20% of tokens for the variable, has not faded away. Although it is not used at all by some speakers, it is actually the variant of choice for others, and for still other speakers, it has taken on a particular discourse function, that of indexing narration. Comparison with variation in the third-person plural, in which a traditional variant is also in competition with an external variant, shows that the decline of je…ons is linked to its greater saliency, making it a prime candidate for social reevaluation.An earlier version of this article was presented at UKLVC-3, held in July 2001 at the University of York, U.K. We thank audience members for comments. We also thank Raymond Mougeon, along with this journal's anonymous referees, for useful comments on an earlier written version. The research was funded by standard research grants awarded to King and Nadasdi by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The variable use of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) in null subject languages, though extensively researched in several Spanish dialects, is for the first time examined in a contact variety of Puerto Rican residents of New York City (NYC). In a large-scale study conducted by Flores-Ferrán (2002), a number of contradictions arose with regard to how the degree of exposure to NYC may mediate the influence of overt SPP use on speakers. The degree of exposure to NYC was considered as indirect contact with English. This article further analyzes how 41 Puerto Rican residents in NYC use overt SPPs, and it also describes the patterns of each group: the recent arrivals, established residents, and native-born NYC Puerto Ricans. Of the larger study, this article examines the verbs' person and number, switch reference, and exposure to NYC. A striking resemblance in the patterns of overt SPP use was found among NYC residents, as a group, when compared to those reported on the island (Ávila-Jiménez, 1995, 1996; Cameron, 1992). However, when considering years of exposure to the City, the NYC native-born group appeared to have the strongest tendency to use explicit SPPs. In spite of the fact that this distinction was found with the NYC native-born group, there remains little evidence in favor of an English contact hypothesis.This study has benefited from previous research conducted by Richard Cameron and Bárbara Ávila-Jiménez. I thank Richard for his insight, comments, and his continuous support throughout the years. I also express much gratitude to Ricardo Otheguy and Edward Bendix and the three anonymous reviewers whose sharp criticisms contributed to this work. All errors, of course, remain mine.

This research explores the extent to which the speech of Appalachian migrants in Ypsilanti, Michigan has been affected by the emerging local norm, an ongoing dialect change labeled the Northern Cities Shift (NCS). Recorded speech from these migrants was acoustically analyzed to determine whether the NCS feature of low-front vowel raising of was present. Index scores derived from formant values were then subjected to statistical analysis to determine the degree to which the respondents' use of this vowel reflects participation in the NCS. The respondents' use or nonuse of this feature was correlated with their sex, social status, age, and social network characteristics to determine which, if any, have influenced respondents' participation, or lack of participation, in the NCS. The results show that social network and sex are statistically significant predictors of acquisition, or lack of acquisition, of the feature in question, whereas age and socioeconomic status are not.This research is part of a National Science Foundation Grant titled “Accommodation in Language Variation and Change.” This research owes much to the support and commitment of Dennis Preston. I am also grateful to Diane Aleksa, Annabelle Mooney, and anonymous reviewers who provided valuable input on earlier versions of this article.