American Israelis are an understudied but regionally important population in Israel, who use American English as a heritage language. Most heritage language situations previously studied investigate low-status heritage languages rather than high-status heritage languages which function as languages of wider communication. Does the majority language (i.e., Modern Hebrew) influence the minority language (i.e., American English) in this unusual case, as predicted by previous research? This question is investigated through a picture-naming task comparing the speech acoustics of stop production in American English heritage speakers, American olim (i.e., immigrants), and native Hebrew speakers. Results reveal a heritage accent in Modern Hebrew rather than American English, with crosslinguistic influence from the minority language to the majority language. This unexpected result is explained using Flege and Bohn (2021)’s Revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r), which argues that phones in a bilingual’s phonetic system are linked, allowing for, and even predicting, this type of crosslinguistic influence.

The chapter ’The Feline Territory of Language’ shows us how we can approach online language variation with dialectology and outlines the steps to take for a dialectological description of a regional language variety, ranging from dialect data collection to dictionary-making. Using cat-related headwords and survey questions as examples, we look at how the data is collected and presented in the Survey of English Dialects and the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects. The chapter then moves on to dialect lexicography, with cats illustrating the approaches of the EDD, the OED, and the Urban Dictionary, leading us into online dialectology and its use of computers to collect, analyse, and display the data. The last section of the chapter covers phonetics, including its acoustic and articulatory branches. Instead of the usually studied human sounds, however, it takes cat vocalisations to illustrate what to do in phonetics.

Chapter 2 focuses on methodological concerns within sociophonetics.The chapter presents an overview of phonetic methods as they relate to sociophonetic inquiry and highlights key points of departure in the methodological approach to and analysis of sociophonetic data.It begins with a general overview of the key concepts and approaches from both phonetics and sociolinguistics, and also discusses some of the major methods by which sociophonetic research is undertaken. The investigation of two kinds of segmental features, vowels and sibilants, is emphasized in order to explicate many of the central methods.The chapter draws from some of the foundational sociolinguistic as well as more recent experimental studies to connect methodological approaches in phonetics to growing research interests in examining social factors.As well, the chapter delves into not just acoustic but also auditory approaches, looking at how research on speech processing is an increasingly important part of the sociophonetic landscape.As we end the chapter, we provide an overview of some of the methods used in recent sociophonetic work on speech perception.

Chapter 3 continues the focus on methodological concerns, outlining and demonstrating how typical acoustic analyses proceeds from fieldwork to acoustic measurements and data extraction to analysis.This treatment goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of "doing" sociophonetics, with more hand’s on procedures for the identification, processing and measurement of vowels and sibilantsThis chapter is intended to introduce readers to and provide the work flow for some basic analyses using common software.The survey of key methods and fundamental terms presented in this and the previous chapter provides a foundation for reading and understanding the approaches used in sociophonetic literature and in exploring the research presented in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of phonetics, the study of human speech sounds. It examines two main approaches: articulatory phonetics, which shows how humans produce the sounds of language, and acoustic phonetics, which explains the physical properties of speech sounds. The chapter explains how speech is produced by modifying the shape of the vocal tract and how the articulators interact. We learn why the International Phonetic Alphabet is necessary to study world languages, and ample practice in using the IPA is provided. Practice goes hand in hand with a detailed categorization and description of speech sounds, both consonants and vowels, summarized in charts and figures. The chapter also examines speech processes which lead to changes in the quality of a sound due to the linguistic context. Descriptions and examples of processes such as assimilation, palatalization, nasalization, dissimilation, epenthesis, and deletion, are included in this section. The final part of the chapter introduces readers to acoustic properties of speech sounds by focusing on spectrograms and how to interpret them.