This study investigates mood choice for five Acadian French communities in Atlantic Canada which have intertwined settlement histories but which differ in terms of type and degree of dialect contact. The two communities with least contact with supralocal French preserve the highly salient imperfect subjunctive, moribund or absent from most other present-day spoken French varieties. While four communities exhibit high selection rates for the present subjunctive, in line with variationist analyses of other French varieties, one community has surprisingly low rates of such usage, along with absence of the imperfect subjunctive. This dichotomy is explained by the local prestige of the smaller of two founder groups for the community, settlers from Haute-Bretagne, France, a dialect area for which the historical record reveals low levels of subjunctive forms. The results highlight the importance not only of demographic factors but also of local identity construction in the formation of new contact varieties.

This paper introduces the Personalized Implicit Association Test (P-IAT, Olson & Fazio, 2004) as a novel measure for language attitudes. Tying in with sociolinguists’ renewed interest in social psychological attitude measures (e.g., Campbell-Kibler, 2012; Pantos & Perkins, 2012; Speelman, Spruyt, Impe & Geeraerts, 2013), the study uses the P-IAT to measure associations with regional varieties of Belgian Dutch and compares the results to an explicit measurement, as well as the results from an experiment using auditory affective priming, another reaction time based attitude measure developed in social psychology, reported in Speelman et al. (2013). Results from both implicit measures show a strong preference for the standard variety of Belgian Dutch over out-group regional varieties, as well as in-group preferences for participants’ own variety over other regional varieties. However, results do not entirely coincide. The paper concludes by discussing the benefits and potential demerits of the P-IAT as a measure of language attitudes.

This paper addresses the question whether listeners possess sociolinguistic knowledge of regional variation in a sound change affecting /s/ + voiceless stop sequences in Andalusian Spanish. We tested whether speakers from Seville and Granada were perceived as more Sevillian-sounding and as younger when a stimulus contained the novel phonetic variant, a post-aspirated stop. Word-medial syllable-final /s/ was manipulated in such a way that two stimuli of the same speaker differed only in whether they contained pre-aspiration ([eh.ˈtaŋ.ko]) or post-aspiration ([e.ˈthaŋ.ko]). Andalusian listeners rated the same speaker as younger and as more Sevillian-sounding when the stimulus contained a post-aspirated stop. The recognition of a speaker’s actual dialect was particularly high when the innovative variant was embedded in a Seville speaker’s speech, confirming earlier work that indexicality is context-specific. The results suggest that Andalusian listeners possess knowledge of the regional variation and the sound change and use this variation in social perception.

Researchers in dialectometry have begun to explore measurements based on fundamentally quantitative metrics, often sourced from dialect corpora, as an alternative to the traditional signals derived from dialect atlases. This change of data type amplifies an existing issue in the classical paradigm, namely that locations may vary in coverage and that this affects the distance measurements: pairs involving a location with lower coverage suffer from greater noise and therefore imprecision. We propose a method for increasing robustness using generalized additive modeling, a statistical technique that allows leveraging the spatial arrangement of the data. The technique is applied to data from the British English dialect corpus FRED; the results are evaluated regarding their interpretability and according to several quantitative metrics. We conclude that data availability is an influential covariate in corpus-based dialectometry and beyond, and recommend that researchers be aware of this issue and of methods to alleviate it.