This chapter provides an overview of Indian South African English, which remains an important ethnolect within South Africa, since language shift has resulted in the Indian population having English as its L1 (with the exception of new post-1994 migrants from India). Yet SAIE remains culturally distinct and in turning into an L1, SAIE has not jettisoned the L2 features of three to four decades ago, when shift was at its peak. This position aligns SAIE with Irish English as “language shift varieties”. The L2-features-turned-L1 illustrated in this chapter do not occur as frequently as in the 1970s and 1980s. Many speakers are now polystylistic (in either a general South African English or even an acrolectal standard variety tied slightly more to international than White South African English). However, the former L2 features do surface in the most informal end of the stylistic continuum, especially in in-group speech, as illustrated in this chapter.

Recent studies have shown that neural activity tracks the syntactic structure of phrases and sentences in connected speech. This work has sparked intense debate, with some researchers aiming to account for the effect in terms of the overt or imposed prosodic properties of the speech signal. In this chapter, we present four types of arguments against attempts to explain putatively syntactic tracking effects in prosodic terms. The most important limitation of such prosodic accounts is that they are architecturally incomplete, as prosodic information does not arise in speech autonomously. Prosodic and syntactic structure are interrelated, so prosodic cues are informative about the intended syntactic analysis, and syntactic information can be used to aid speech perception. Rather than trying to attribute neural tracking effects exclusively to one linguistic component, we consider it more fruitful to think about ways in which the interaction between the components drives the neural signal.

One of the riddles of human communication is interlocutors’ ability to adapt to “noisy” inputs. It is argued that it is the interpersonal coordination of rhythmic structure underlying this ability, which can be selectively activated. This process is described as a set of mechanisms operating on linguistic and phonetic structures: Interaction Phonology. Interaction phonology provides the necessary scaffold for enabling an alignment of phonetic-phonological and potentially also higher-order linguistic representations. This coordination process relies on the rhythmic structure of the individual language or register pertaining to the ongoing communication. That way, interlocutors can attend to relevant phonetic detail unveiling higher-order symbolic information and adapt their own rhythmic pattern to enhance mutual comprehension. The testable predictions of Interaction Phonology are discussed in the light of recent empirical evidence, and the initial version of Interaction Phonology is modified: Perception–production coupling is marked as optional, and the automaticity between rhythmic entrainment and higher-order symbolic alignment is questioned.

Temporal properties, such as duration, rate, and rhythm, are crucial aspects influencing the perception and production of speech. To study how these properties affect speech processing, researchers can create retimed experimental stimuli with varying temporal patterns. However, retiming speech also poses significant challenges, such as preserving naturalness, intelligibility, and prosody. In this chapter, we present three methods of altering the acoustic speech signal to achieve a desired rhythmic structure. Each method differs in how it adjusts the timing of the utterance and its segments. The methods are used to create stimuli with regular isochronous stress. We evaluate the methods in terms of how much they disrupt the speech signal and how effective they are in achieving isochrony. Finally, we demonstrate how retiming can be used to produce stimuli with more naturalistic rhythmic characteristics. We show that retiming can be a powerful tool for exploring perceptual effects of timing in speech.

Despite their genetic relatedness, Romance languages and dialects exhibit considerable differences in their phonological systems. In rhythm typology, Spanish was long considered a textbook example of the so-called syllable-timing type, while the classifications for French and Portuguese were often disputed. Rhythmic differences were also found between the more accent-based European varieties of Portuguese and the more syllable-based Brazilian dialects. Our contribution first endeavors to carry out a phonological assessment of the degree of syllable prominence and accent prominence in European French, Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as in varieties of Spanish and Portuguese spoken in the Americas. In a second step, we conduct a phonetic case study using comparable spoken language data of the varieties under investigation.

Spoken language is a complex signal that evolves over time and conveys rhythm across multiple timescales. Beyond the signal level, there is rhythm in social aspects of speech communication such as joint attention, gestures, or turn-taking. Neural oscillations have in many cases been shown to directly reflect the rhythmic features of speech. However, the knowledge about origins, specific functions, and potential interactions of different rhythms and their neural signatures is far from complete. An integrative perspective that builds on phylogenetic and ontogenetic developments can provide some of the missing components. Here we propose that speech production and perception engage evolutionary ancient temporal processing mechanisms that guide sensorimotor sequencing and the allocation of cognitive resources in time. Slow-wave (delta-to-theta band) oscillations are the designated common denominator of these mechanisms, which interact in a speech-specific variant of the perception–action cycle with the goal to achieve optimal temporal coordination and predictive adaptation in speech communication.

This chapter explores the linguistic consequences of language contact between English and Afrikaans in South Africa, focusing on the English spoken by Afrikaans speakers in South Africa. Against the backdrop of two centuries of language contact and bilingualism, the multifaceted nature of interactions in diverse social settings are investigated, and the linguistic outcomes of these settings are outlined. The chapter highlights the bidirectional influence between Afrikaans and English, with evidence of influence mainly from Afrikaans to Afrikaans South African English (ASAE), but the reciprocal influence between ASAE and other vernaculars is also highlighted. The linguistic review describes ASAE pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and stylistic features, by offering evidence from corpora, dictionaries and important works on the two ethnic subvarieties of ASAE. Overall, strong similarities with White South African English are found, but some differences reveal the influence from Afrikaans. For phonological features, there are quantity rather than quality differences for the tense-lax vowel contrast and hiatus breaking through [h] that distinguish ASAE from WSAE. For lexicogrammar, ASAE is observed to model its use of lexemes, collocational patterns and more abstract grammatical patterns, on Afrikaans constructions. The likelihood that White South African English speakers are not directly influenced by Afrikaans itself but rather by ASAE is considered as a topic for further study.

A long-standing debate among scholars continues concerning the validity of rhythmic classification of the world’s languages. In order to address the remaining questions, it is key to further explore the speech production by bilinguals with 2L1s and second-language speakers. According to the majority of previous studies, results from bilinguals are intermediate between those of the two kinds of monolinguals, and results from second-language speakers are influenced by the rhythms of their first languages, which appear to support the rhythmic classification. However, several questions remain. The first is how to classify languages that exhibit characteristics of multiple rhythmic types. The second is that previous studies generally demonstrate that languages are more or less stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed, rather than strictly belonging to a single rhythm category. The third is that the proposed rhythmic measures are not comprehensive, and new measures are needed to account for the morphological and syntactic components of languages.

One of the remarkable characteristics of spoken language is that it is constantly undergoing change. The plasticity of sound patterns, that is, their susceptibility to short- and long-term changes, is driven by processes of mutual adaptation during conversational interactions and thereby reflects a constant interplay of perceptual and motor processes of spoken language. Existing models of speech motor control largely neglect the environment-driven phonetic plasticity by focusing on single-person accounts of spoken language production. This chapter addresses the roles of cortical and subcortical structures in the accommodation of speakers and listeners in interactive language use. It reviews investigations of the propensity of patients with different neurologic conditions to align with or adapt to others’ speech, with a particular focus on the role of speech rhythm.

This chapter presents English in the Philippines, its evolution from a transported language to its many forms today as Englishes within and beyond Philippine borders. With this within-and-beyond approach to Philippine Englishes (PhEs), a blend of old and new histories is hopefully reached to underscore an important point, namely that English in the Philippines is not fixed nor unaffected by history. English arrived in 1898 with the establishment of the American colonial government. Due to the widespread public education system introduced by the Americans, English leapt from foundation stage to stabilization in a few decades, and proceeded to its present state as differentiated forms. In this chapter, illustrations of Englishes in the everyday realities of multilingual and translingual Filipinos are presented. However, PhEs also spill over borders. In labor migration contexts, PhEs are disentangled in the phenomenal movement of Filipino migrant workers across the globe. In presenting PhEs, we invoke multi/translingual complexities and processes associated with mobility, as we flesh out a more complex and contingent historicizing of Englishes within and beyond the Philippines.

Almost no seminar, book, or YouTube tutorial on successful public speaking is without the established and traditional “cork exercise.” It is supposed to enhance speakers’ rhythm and intelligibility, for which there is, however, no scientific evidence so far. Our experiment addresses this gap. Twenty speakers performed a presentation task three times: (1) before a cork exercise intervention, (2) immediately after it, and (3) some minutes later after having completed a distractor questionnaire. The intervention was a video recorded by a professional media trainer. Results show significant rhythmic (and related melodic and articulatory) differences between presentations (1) and (2), suggesting a positive effect for speakers in (2). However, in presentation (3), all measurements revert to the baseline presentation (1) level. Thus, the "cork exercise" basically works and yields positive effects; however, they are short-lived. The chapter ends with suggestions for further research and practical ideas for a more sustainable design of the cork exercise.

The importance of history in the emergence and evolution of varieties of English around the world cannot be overstated. From religious missionaries to colonial administrations, the particular mix of peoples, languages and cultures was central to the type of evolutionary trajectory English took. This chapter offers a historical account of the evolution of English in Cameroon under missionary, colonial (German, French and British) and postcolonial conditions. It identifies some of the crucial factors that enabled it to survive even when the territory was ruled by non-English colonisers like the Germans and the French. Using written documents produced during colonialism, the current chapter traces the impact of the colonial system on contemporary Cameroonian society and the variety of English spoken there with focus on processes of cultural conceptualisation and hybridised patterns of social interaction. This is done via the lenses of two recent theoretical frameworks, namely cognitive contact linguistics and postcolonial pragmatics. The chapter also identifies some distinctive structural features of contemporary Cameroon English, contrasting some of them to West African and East African Englishes.