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.

The current study used a hand-drawn map task, a dialect difference rating task, and a dialect classification task to explore the relationship between participants’ ideologies about dialect differences and their classification of authentic talkers from six regional varieties in Enshi Prefecture, China. The talkers frequently mistaken for each other in the dialect classification task were those who came from counties that were perceived to have similar dialects in the hand-drawn map task and the dialect difference rating task. Participants showed a positive response bias for the Enshi dialect in classifying talkers, corresponding to the dialect difference ratings that Enshi was rated as least different. Thus participants’ classification of real talkers was largely consistent with their ideologies about differences among “imagined” dialects. Participants’ ideologies about dialect differences were shaped by their home county, and their classification performance was affected by their home county and the talker’s social background.

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.

We recorded older male speakers and younger female speakers of 86 local dialects of Dutch. Using these data, we analyze and visualize the influence of standard Dutch on apparent time changes in these dialects. Focusing for the most part on variation in the sound components, we test whether (I) dialect change is mainly the result of convergence to standard Dutch, (II) sound changes in two dialects which make them converge to standard Dutch also make them more similar, and (III) sound changes in two dialects which make them diverge from standard Dutch also make them less similar. We used three-dimensional (first hypothesis) and five-dimensional Levenshtein distance implementations (second and third hypothesis). These implementations are a novel step in dialectometry and in the study of ongoing processes of language change and their consequences for the dialect landscape. The findings corroborate all three hypotheses.

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.

In this paper, ideas from perceptual dialectology, linguistics of speech, and cognitive science are drawn upon to explain the perceptions of others’ speech. The perceptual map task, based on Preston’s “Draw-a-map methodology,” was collected from 215 respondents in Poland and transformed into result maps. The second step in the analysis of the perceptual maps was to collect all of the labels that were assigned to the perceived speech varieties around the country. Those two facets of the data show how the idea of connecting speech with a specific locality can be observed quantitatively. The results propose an explanation of the distribution of speech perceptions in Poland. The shape of the perceptions is created through activating gestalt processes to arrive with an observational artifact. Those are based mostly on the concept of geography facilitated by shared cultural schemas. All of those steps lead to a creation of multidimensional perceptual regions.