For seven years in a row (2016 through 2022), we carried out a project with two goals. One was to train undergraduate students in sociolinguistic interviewing; the other was to catch change among English intensifiers. We expected to find an innovative variant, maybe either so or super. However, the incoming form we identify is very. We propose that, after a long decline, very became unusual enough to gain novelty value and be available for recycling. This surprising finding emerges clearly from our fine-grained, real-time data across two registers (speech and instant messaging) despite dozens of different student interviewers and two years of pandemic conditions. The cohesive patterns attest to the fundamental orderliness of language, even in phenomena such as English intensifiers that are characterized by constant, rapid change.

This study investigates how children aged 4 to 12 years participate in /u/-fronting, a phonetically conditioned change in Ontario English in which the high back vowel /u/ is initially more fronted after coronal consonants than in other contexts. A picture naming task was used to elicit vowel tokens from children and their parents, and F1 and F2 measurements were extracted using FAVE. Children in all three age groups (4-6, 7-9, 10-12 years) were found to have significantly higher F2 values for /u/ (indicating more fronting) than adults in the non-coronal environment. This pattern does not appear to follow the predicted pattern of incrementation of sound change by older children. Instead, the findings may reflect overgeneralization of /u/-fronting, with young children extending the change to a new phonetic context during acquisition, or an earlier start to the incrementation of this variable in this population.

The present paper investigates a constructional alternation currently under development in Mozambican Portuguese, arising from the constructionalization of a new passive construction (Recipient passives) alongside its standard counterpart (Theme passives). We argue that beyond the influence of the Bantu substrate that led to the emergence of the innovative variant, variation is conceptually and pragmatically motivated and involves restructuring in accordance with the structural constraints of Portuguese. We show how the alternation proves sensitive to a set of linguistic factors, the most prominent of which are related to information structure and differences in perspectivization, or construal. By adopting a sociocognitive view of language and a network view of grammar, we aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of restructuration and indigenization processes taking place in postcolonial varieties of pluricentric languages in the sequence of their nativization.

This cross-dialectal diachronic study focuses on actualization—the gradual mapping out of structural innovations across linguistic environments—and asks: to what extent can the route by which actualization unfolds be explained by appealing to common cognitive constraints, and to what extent are pathways of actualization shaped by community-specific patterns in language use? I analyze real-time syntactic change in Spanish oblique relative clauses (ORCs), which are undergoing an enhancive change towards increasing use of antecedent-agreeing definite articles (e.g., la casa en [la] que nací ‘the house in which I was born’). Over 8,000 occurrences of ORCs were compiled from three Latin American varieties. A Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression analysis shows that various constraints representing the cognitive accessibility of the antecedent influence actualization similarly across varieties. The discussion addresses the cognitive realism of historical corpus data and formulates testable predictions that present profitable lines of inquiry in future cognitively oriented cross-dialectal diachronic research.

Recent research into vowel covariation has suggested that speakers can be identified as leaders or laggers in multiple ongoing sound changes. What remains unclear is how stable a speaker’s patterns of covariation are over time and whether these leaders and laggers of sound changes remain leaders and laggers over time. We employ corpus data from 51 New Zealand English (NZE) speakers who were recorded at two time-points (eight years apart) and explore covariation between 10 monophthongs using principal component analysis (PCA). The results indicate significant stability across the time-points in two unique vowel clusters, suggesting that speakers’ covariation position within their community remains stable over time. The overall covariation patterns also replicate patterns previously observed in a different corpus of NZE, indicating that patterns of vowel covariation observed with PCA can be stable and replicable across multiple corpora.

The release and aspiration of word-final /t/ and /d/ are important sociolinguistic variables in American English because they have strong, contextually driven indexicality. Word-final /t d/ releases are usually coded impressionistically due to the absence of automated methods for identifying prepausal release bursts or aspiration. This paper introduces an automated method for identifying released tokens prepausally and for measuring phonetic properties of releases. We use the method to code prepausal /t d/ release versus non-release in a corpus of conversational English in Raleigh. We assess the data in relation to internal and social factors in order to validate the automated method, finding that the patterns in the automatically generated distributions match those in previous studies. We next show that among Raleigh White speakers but not Black speakers, /t d/ releases are becoming more frequent and stronger after obstruents across apparent time, a change that reflects Raleigh’s changing cultural landscape.

This article is the first to quantify the interindividual effects of different major life events (MLEs) on retrospective perceptions of individual-level linguistic change across the adult lifespan. In this cross-sectional study, 701 German-speaking participants from Austria completed an online survey measuring the extent to which MLEs in the educational, occupational, and personal domain are associated with perceived changes in productive and affective-attitudinal aspects of the sociolinguistic repertoire. Bayesian modeling revealed that events such as beginning a tertiary degree, entry into the workforce, and retirement were perceived to impact participants’ varietal use. Overall, however, affective-attitudinal factors such as dialect identity appear to be more readily susceptible to perceived MLE-related change. These results help pave a new path for variationist agendas that approach lifespan linguistic change not as a result of chronological age, but rather as a phenomenon influenced by individual experiential factors complexly intertwined with the process of aging.

While dialectal variation is often investigated from a geographical angle, there exists substantial variation both within the community and individual. The aim of the present article is to investigate the extent to which spatial, occupational, and age-related factors are associated with the diversity of linguistic variants reported per informant at a given locality. Drawing on colloquial language data from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache ‘Atlas of Colloquial German,’ we found that informants from southeastern Germany and Austria reported familiarity with more variants. Moreover, we multifactorially operationalize occupational complexity, a variable that can capture the effects of different communicative, technical, and physical skills required in a job (via the Dictionary of Occupational Titles). Bayesian multilevel modeling revealed that informants in occupations involving physical precision work and communicative complexity reported less familiarity with variants, and that younger informants were familiar with a wider range of variants.

Despite the attention (ing) has received in variationist literature, it is comparatively understudied in the North West of England where it holds something of a unique sociolinguistic profile. Variation in this region is between three competing forms: [ɪŋɡ] appears alongside the usual [ɪn]/[ɪŋ] variants. Based on sociolinguistic interviews with 32 speakers from this region, this study investigates whether [ɪŋɡ] replaces [ɪŋ] as the local standard or exists alongside it to fulfill a different sociolinguistic role. Results suggest that [ɪŋ] is maintained as the standard variant, and that [ɪŋɡ] occupies its own functional space as a feature of emphatic and hyper-articulate speech, appearing almost exclusively before pause. (ing) also shows no sensitivity to part of speech, despite the strength of this effect in other varieties of English. These results are discussed in the context of broader questions regarding the underlying representation of this variation, specifically its allophonic or allomorphic nature.

Language variation is demonstrably affected by accumulated experiences reflecting the consequences of the contexts in which words are most frequently used. Yet, these contextual frequency effects are seldom explored in children’s speech. This study uses a corpus-based approach to investigate how 29 Spanish-speaking children, aged 5–15, realize word-initial Spanish /d/ as a function of accumulated experiences with /d/-initial words in articulatory contexts that promote reduction. Contextual frequency effects are also examined in 12 Spanish-speaking adults from the children’s community. Cumulative experience is estimated as the form’s frequency of occurrence in a specific context that promotes a specific variant. Results reveal contextual frequency effects in both the child and adult data. Moreover, the extent of the contextual frequency effect is comparable across generations.

Local orientation has been shown to influence speakers’ participation in local dialect norms and ongoing sound changes since the beginning of modern sociolinguistics (e.g., Labov, 1963). I argue here that local orientation is best understood as an orientation to the ideological imagined place, rather than to the actual physical hometown itself. Analysis of the effect of orientation to the imagined Philadelphia shows that speakers’ personal orientation impacts their adoption of an ongoing change. This change is best understood when orientation is considered alongside a major structural influence on young speakers—secondary school attendance—using a bipartite network analysis. The sound change under investigation, a change in the conditioning of a split in /æ/, is highly abstract and complex, making it an unlikely candidate for overt or intentional identity work. Nevertheless, a regression analysis finds strong effects of both structural influences and personal orientation on speakers’ advancement in this abstract change.

This study is concerned with attitudes of Albanian listeners toward the two main dialects spoken in Albania: Gheg and Tosk. The study seeks to establish a connection between attitudes and speech features which have been shown to be changing in Gheg, and other features found to be stable. Ratings of four speech features on visual analog scales (VASs) pertaining to dialect identification, status, and solidarity were collected from 125 Albanian listeners and modeled with Bayesian regressions. The results revealed lower status for variants of features found to be changing in Gheg, contrary to stable variants, suggesting a connection between attitudes and dialect change, and highlighting the relevance of both language-external and internal factors in understanding change. All stimuli were also rated as more friendly than unfriendly, which could be related to sociocultural specificities of Albania. The study finally identifies methodological challenges to do with modeling responses from VASs.

Here we investigate present tense verbal -s/zero variability in a dialect of Eastern England in which -s marking can only appear in third-person singular contexts. Our objective is to explore constraints on -s/zero marking, and to consider the grammatical function of -s in such a variety. In order to investigate this, we reanalyzed verbal -s/zero marking in 63 sociolinguistic interviews found in Peter Trudgill’s (1974) corpus from Norwich. The results show not only a significant role for subject animacy (animate subjects mark -s less than inanimates) and lexical (punctual verbs mark -s less than duratives) and structural aspect (punctual and habitual events mark less -s than durative ones), but also an interaction between animacy and aspect. To account for the findings, we draw upon the notion of differential subject marking (e.g., Aissen, 2003), which considers the role of the canonicity of arguments in accounting for morphological marking.

While the loss of regional distinctiveness across the southeastern UK is well studied and largely undisputed, there is less consensus about class-based divisions. This paper investigates this question through an updated analysis of the variety emblematic of Britain’s upper class: Received Pronunciation (RP). While previous studies have suggested levelling in RP to a broader standard southeastern norm, our findings indicate that the most recent advances in the variety show it (re)differentiating itself from other varieties in the region. Investigating both individual vowel movements and broader system-wide properties, we argue that the changes observed in RP today result from speakers adopting a particular articulatory setting (lax voice), which has subsequent ramifications on vowel realizations. We suggest that speakers make strategic use of this articulatory setting as a way of embodying an elite persona in the British context, an interpretation that resonates with the social distributions of similar changes in other varieties.

This paper shows (a) how the concept of the linguistic market can be operationalized as an index to enable its inclusion as a factor in variationist analysis and (b) how this index helps to explain sociolinguistic variation in a diglossic situation. To do this, sociolinguistic interviews were conducted in Swiss Standard German among 16 L1-dialect-speakers aged between 19 and 40 from Biel/Bienne in western Switzerland. Drawing from participants’ self-assessments of the importance of Standard German in their professional life, a linguistic market index (LMI) was created and cross-validated with external assessments. Our variationist analysis considered four phonetic-phonological variables—/k/, /ç/, /aː/, /ɛ-ɛː/—for which typical Swiss variants (i.e., sociolinguistic stereotypes) exist. Findings show that the LMI is crucial for explaining variation in all the variables tested. Other social (i.e., gender and formality of the language production task) and linguistic factors (e.g., phonetic environment) show partial effects as well.

Transitivity has come to be recognized as a promising heuristic tool for uncovering implicit ideologies in a wide range of areas. Though it has been used to explore worldviews in several kinds of discourse, nearly all have relied solely on qualitative analyses. Statistical analysis can offer a fuller understanding of past societies. This study applies a gradient, discourse-based understanding of transitivity, which lends itself nicely to corpus-based analysis, to data from 16th-century New Spain. In colonial Mexico, female behaviors were often strictly circumscribed. This paper uses a quantitative, corpus-based framework to examine how gender inequality is reflected in patterns of transitivity. It is found that female subjects are significantly associated with imperfective contexts, nonfinite constructions, akinesis, and low affectedness of the object—all markers of lower transitivity. Thus, for the most part, in these data, women are represented as inactive, inert, and powerless.

This study examines the extent to which the Basque ergative -k marker is undergoing change in the Basque Autonomous Community. The inclusion of Standard Basque in the education system since 1982 has brought a significant generational change in the mode of language acquisition: older speakers had no formal education in Basque, whereas younger speakers were educated in the Basque immersion program. Contrary to popular belief, results provide no evidence of ergative loss in apparent time; rather, they are consistent with linguistic stabilization. We claim that the differences in social constraints of gender and language use among the younger group reflect social changes, in which mode of language acquisition is responsible for the social stabilization and further stratification of ergativity. We conclude by arguing that minoritized contexts undergoing language revitalization provide important implications for sociolinguistic change, whereby social changes are embraced in assessing linguistic change.