This paper examines subject expression in heritage Vietnamese, focusing on its variation in a diasporic, cross-generational context, using corpus data from 45 speakers in Canberra, Australia. While subject expression has been widely studied in other languages, little is known about its use in languages like Vietnamese, which has an “open-class” pronominal system. Results show that although the rates of unexpressed subjects remain stable, the linguistic conditions underlying this variable have undergone change: first-generation speakers are least likely to drop second-person subjects, while second-generation speakers are least likely to drop first-person subjects. Both patterns contradict expectations given the pragmatic constraints of pro-drop in Vietnamese. We further interpret this as potentially a form of community bricolage to re-establish a more equal cross-generational relationship in a diaspora setting. Ultimately, we present a case of pragmatic change driving grammatical choices, thereby also highlighting that contrary to the traditional description, Vietnamese subject expression is perhaps not so “radical” after all.

This study examines the future temporal reference (FTR) system among Francophones and Anglophones speaking English in Kapuskasing, Ontario. Previous studies have shown that in Laurentian French, the go future is the preferred variant, and the strongest determinant of variant choice is polarity: negatives strongly favor the inflected future. In Canadian English, the go future has no polarity effect and there is robust variation with will, highlighting a key contrast in the underlying constraints between the French and English FTR systems. The results show that while older Anglophones pattern in tandem with known studies of English, Francophones, as well as young Anglophones, exhibit the polarity contrast of the French system, even though they are speaking English. We suggest that these results may stem from social alignment between Francophones and Anglophones driven by increasing linguistic and social symmetry in the community, as well as increasing positive affect toward French in Kapuskasing.

In this paper, we advocate for the analysis of lexical variation being central to variationist sociolinguistics. We demonstrate that lexical variation is systematic and argue that this systematicity must be accounted for by a comprehensive variationist theory that explains the general causes and mechanisms of language variation and change. We present three empirical studies, which focus on lexical variation in Anglo-Cornish, British Sign Language, and online American English. These studies differ greatly in terms of their methods and results, but each reaffirms that lexis can be studied rigorously and informatively within the variationist paradigm, extending our understanding of language variation and change.

Social salience, the association of a social category with linguistic variables, has been hypothesized to be an important driver of language change. This hypothesis has not been rigorously tested due to the lack of a reliable measure of social salience. In this paper, we present Salience Categorization Test (Sali-CAT), a new approach to measuring the association of word variants with social categories across multiple lexical variables. The approach includes a customized experimental paradigm (three alternative forced choice) and a statistical method to establish the baseline Salience Ratio (Sali-RAT) score for word variants that do not have a bias in usage with respect to the social categories. We demonstrate the approach by testing the association of multiple variables with different generations of speakers in the Gurindji speech community.