This chapter provides a thorough, up-to-date review of the literature on the phonetics and phonology of early bilinguals. It pulls together studies from a range of bilingual settings, including bilingual societies and heritage language contexts. While the chapter mostly reviews evidence from adolescent and adult participants, it also makes reference to the child bilingualism literature, where appropriate. The chapter first reviews studies on the accents of early versus late bilinguals, followed by a discussion of the various explanatory accounts for the observed differences between these two groups. Subsequently, the critical significance of early linguistic experience on bilingual speech patterns is considered, with particular reference to the evidence from childhood overhearers and international adoptees. The following sections then review studies comparing simultaneous and early sequential bilinguals, and those exploring the role of language dominance, continued use, the language of the environment in bilinguals’ pronunciation patterns, and the role of sociolinguistic factors in early bilingual speech patterns. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research.

This chapter examines the acquisition of vowels and consonants in perception and production during typical second language (L2) acquisition by sequential, dominant bilinguals. The acoustic and articulatory studies reviewed serve to illustrate general patterns of L2 segmental learning with a focus on four principal themes, each structured around one or two main research questions: 1) cross-linguistic influence (How does a sequential, dominant bilingual’s first language shape L2 segmental perception and production?); 2) development (Are there universal patterns to L2 segmental speech development? Are certain vocalic and consonantal phenomena acquired more easily?); 3) inter- and intralearner variability (What are the sources of differences in perception and/or production between learners and for the same learner over time and in different communicative contexts?); and 4) training effects (What are the effects of training on learning? How do variables such as task and stimuli type condition effectiveness?).

This chapter reviews available information on the phonetics and phonology of indigenous language bilinguals published in the last few decades, focusing on both of the bilinguals’ languages, the interplay between their phonological systems, and the phonetic realizations of the sounds present in their languages. We understand indigenous languages as predominantly minority languages spoken by linguistically distinct and often socially marginalized and vulnerable ethnic groups, autochthonous to a specific region of the world, and found in diglossias with majority international languages resulting from colonization. Indigenous language bilingualism is usually small-scale and involves speaking at least one minority indigenous language and at least one majority international language, thus being a step toward a seemingly inevitable language shift and in some cases an eventual indigenous language disappearance. The dynamic and asymmetrical character of indigenous bilingualism, along with the vast number of language combinations and the speaker community size differences between the members of these language pairs, sets it apart from other types of bilingualism considered in this book.

Mersea Island is a small island off the coast of north-east Essex, UK, which has a rich history of contact, ranging from Viking and Roman settlements to more modern influxes of evacuees and military personnel during both World Wars. The island itself also has a history of isolation, due to its only access road being cut off regularly by lunar tides. However, this isolation has been challenged over more recent years by various building projects, resulting in a large influx of non-islanders moving and settling on the island. This overview will present a range of phonological features across both the consonantal and vocalic systems of Mersea Island English as evidence from both older and younger Islanders to highlight traditional features and the direction of change within the community as a whole. A selection of morphosyntactic features which highlight more salient structures of Mersea Island English is then presented before a discussion of how we may wish to evaluate paths of change moving forward in relation to both socio-cultural and linguistic factors.

The chapter deals with segmental and suprasegmental features of English spoken by residents of England without a recent migration history – though two major new varieties, British Asian English and Multicultural London English, are briefly discussed. While the emphasis is on the period since the turn of the twenty-first century, the chapter also deals with changes since the 1960s. The chapter begins with a presentation of recent technological advances, such as magnetic resonance imaging and innovative quantitative cartographic techniques. This is followed by a discussion of consonants, vowels, rhythm, stress, intonation and voice quality. The chapter goes on to show how some features are involved in levelling at the national or regional level, while other local and regional features are maintained. Using older dialectological sources as well as contemporary sociolinguistic methods, four regions are discussed, those centred on London, Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester. The evidence shows similarities (a general reduction in variation) and differences (maintenance of differences between neighbouring cities). Levelling in the South East involves a shift of vowels towards Received Pronunciation-like variants, while consonants do not take part in this change; the exception is the rapid loss of traditional h-dropping. Finally, the influence of standardisation is discussed.

This chapter introduces you to English vowels, and variation in vowel inventories across varieties of English. The discussion will first focus on English phonetics – the production of individual speech sounds. We will begin by examining the articulatory features used to classify and describe vowels, namely tongue height, front/backness of tongue articulation (also called advancement), degree of lip rounding/spreading. In this overview, we will also examine vowel inventories across a range of languages to understand which vowels are most common cross-linguistically, and why.

In the next sections of the chapter, we will focus on English vowels by first introducing the types of vowels that exist in different varieties of English. We will then examine the vowel inventories in a range of Englishes, among them OVEs including American, British, Australian, and New Zealand Englishes, and NVEs such as African, Asian, and Caribbean Englishes. We will also discuss the concepts of phoneme, phone, and allophone in this chapter, which sets the stage for exploring the concept of phonology through vowel variation within varieties of English, and phonological rules that govern this variation.

Chapter 19 opens by asking readers to reflect on prior collaborations, writing down their views on what makes people easy to work with and what makes them hard to work with. The chapter argues for a team-based approach to public engagement, and suggests ways to build effective teams. Also, it’s important to trust our partners at informal learning venues, as they have expertise on the audiences and logistics in these settings. Emphasizing that communication with these partners is still a conversation, the chapter returns to the principles of a successful conversation described in Chapter 3 and unpacks each one with reference to venue partners. A case study exemplifies these points, describing a partnership between university students and faculty and museum professionals. Details are given of negotiation about institutional missions and daily operations through to a demonstration on children’s science practices in a game about vowel sounds. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to make a detailed plan for getting their demonstration into a specific place or event.

Discussion of English segments, both vowels and consonants, and their representation in terms of distinctive features.

This chapter examines sex differences in the data on General North American English and also considers LGBT speech in film and television performances.

This chapter examines correlations between phonetic measures and performance year, thereby identifying the progress of sound change in General North American English across eight decades. It also presents the phonetic qualities of modern General North American English and traces the evolution of those qualities in the speech of four Californian actors from the early and late periods.

This chapter examines variation and change in the speech of performances by African American, Latino, Asian American, and Indigenous actors.

This chapter examines variation and change in the speech of performances by actors from the South, the Inland North, and Canada.

This chapter presents basic information for a wide readership on how accents differ and how those differences are analyzed, then lays out the sample of performances to be studied, the phonemes and word classes to be analyzed, and the methods of phonetic, quantitative, and statistical analysis to be followed.

This chapter examines variation and change in the speech of performances by actors from the New York City region.

Vowels are traditionally viewed as one of the two major classes of speech sound. Vowels lack contact between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, and they are normally voiced. Importantly, the speaker receives little proprioceptive feedback from their speech organs, meaning that it is not fully appropriate to define a vowel in terms of place and manner of articulation. Instead, tongue height and advancement are used to describe vowel quality, and auditory features play a more important role in description, e.g. with reference to the Cardinal Vowels system. Vowel categories form a continuum, and this has repercussions in terms of articulatory, auditory and acoustic overlap between contrastive categories and the special role that vowel gradience plays in dialect variation and language change. Other features of vowels stem from the general openness of vocalic articulations. For example, in principle, lip rounding can be combined with any tongue position, and nasality too demonstrates specific patterns that have both phonetic and phonological dimensions. Vowel quantity, or duration, is also used in differing ways by different languages, both phonemically and allophonically.

It is generally accepted that the body plays an important stylistic role, but few scholars embark on multimodal investigations of variation. In this chapter I discuss the results of two studies on the realization of the GOAT vowel to show that bodily practices occur alongside, and indeed can influence, linguistic behavior, both from moment to moment (through expressions of affect like smiling) and duratively (through facial postures like an open jaw). Study 1 reveals that GOAT exhibits a higher F2 when it occurs in the context of smiling, suggesting some sound changes may be advancing during moments when the body is used to express heightened affect. Study 2 illustrates that the more durative embodied practice of maintaining an open-jaw setting has had lowering consequences across the vowel system of California English – even for GOAT, which is typically described as undergoing fronting rather than lowering. The proposal advanced here assumes that linguistic variation is meaningful and that a non-trivial number of a linguistic variant’s social meanings derives from embodied practice. And crucially, meaning – some of it embodied – can initiate or influence the trajectory of change.