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.

In the wealth of literature on ethnic variation, ethnicity is often considered independently of other social characteristics. However, prioritizing ethnicity in this way risks overlooking the potential impact of other social factors. In this study, we demonstrate an intersection between ethnicity and social class based on a sociolinguistic corpus of Australian English, representing some of the country’s largest ethnic groups (Australians of Anglo-Celtic, Italian, Greek, and Chinese backgrounds), stratified according to age, gender, and social class. Rather than beginning with the social groupings, we first identify linguistic groupings to then consider how these groupings align with social dimensions. Cluster analyses of speaker random intercepts derived from independent regression analyses of 10 linguistic variables in recordings from 159 speakers reveal primary divisions for age, reflecting change over time, and secondary divisions for ethnicity in conjunction with social class, highlighting the interconnected nature of these social dimensions in linguistic variation.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 uses data from the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe to compare the acoustic correlates of the length contrast in the peripheral vowels of two regions within the Central Yiddish dialect area: central Poland, considered the more conservative variety, and the Transcarpathian Unterland, hypothesized to have diverged from Polish Yiddish in the prewar period. Findings reveal smaller duration differences in [iː] versus [i] and [aː] versus [a] among Unterland speakers compared to speakers from Poland, with a gender effect in the Unterland showing smaller duration distinctions among women. The duration difference in [uː] versus [u] is significantly smaller than the other vowel pairs in both regions, likely reflecting its ambiguous phonemic status. Vowel quality shows no systematic differences between the two regions. The findings point to the possible influence of population mobility, dialect mixing, geopolitics, and multilingualism on vowel systems.

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.