The use of both production and perceptual data has the potential to provide a more complete picture of linguistic phenomena than would otherwise be the case, including when exploring regional linguistic variation. Utilizing the social networking platform Twitter and an online survey, this paper reports on a descriptive analysis of the geographic distribution of a less-commonly used syntactic form of the Spanish verb gustar ‘to like, to please’, referred to as experiential gustar (e.g., cuando gustes ‘when you’d like’). The results from the analysis of 6,686 tweets together with the responses of 81 native Spanish-speaking participants in an online survey suggest that experiential gustar is produced and is perceived to be produced most often in Mexican Spanish, despite not being exclusive to that country. The paper contributes to the literature depicting the benefit of using both production and perceptual data in the study of dialectal variation, as well as to the literature documenting language variation in Spanish.

This paper explores the cultural and historical forces that created variation in terms for “cemetery”, including links between language and material culture, using cemetery terms found within two Linguistic Atlas data sets to demonstrate how colonial influence, cultural changes, and physical locations contribute to linguistic variation. Speakers’ lexical choices in the 1930s still show the effects of the religious and social climates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Northern and southern colonial trends were still influencing regional language use several hundred years later. Furthermore, for the LANE data we find that the physical location of historic cemeteries has an effect on speakers’ use of specific lexical items.

This paper provides an account of the long vowel shift currently underway in the trans-statal Plautdietsch speech community. Placement of the shift within Labov’s typology of vowel shifts reveals a commonly overlooked development in Plautdietsch vowel movement, namely the centralization of mid-high back vowels which must have occurred before the breakup of the community into New and Old World groups. Shared centralization prompted both groups to have similar developments in the back vowel space after they were no longer geographically contiguous and prompted many groups to undergo centralization in the front vowel space. This case study reveals a pattern of innovation in which separation from parent communities fosters linguistic innovations in daughter communities. These innovations occur irrespective of the traditional Molotschna or Chortitza dialect affiliation of the daughter colonies in question.