The present study investigates internal and external constraints conditioning variable T-glottaling, the realization of the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ as a glottal stop [ʔ], in supraregional Scottish Standard English. Drawing on phonemically annotated speech data from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English, a total of 12,162 /t/ tokens produced by 138 speakers were extracted from eight formal speaking categories in the corpus and analyzed auditorily. The results showed that about 28% of the analyzed /t/ tokens were produced as glottal stops, with significant inter- and intra-speaker variability. The realization of T-glottaling is subject to both linguistic (phonetic context and word type) and social factors (age, gender, and speech style). Moreover, patterns of various types of T-glottaling differ from each other and constitute distinctive processes of ongoing sound change in Scotland.

This article examines the progression of the counter-clockwise nasal vowel chain shift in Parisian French, investigating in particular the influence of biological sex and of sexuality on the propagation of this change from below. The research presented forms part of a study on the participation of sexual minorities in ongoing sound change; this study aims to address the continued exclusion of sexual minorities from sociolinguistic studies, which not only invisibilizes queer people, but underlines their behaviour, linguistic or otherwise, as gender-deviant. Using a sociophonetic methodology, an analysis of nasal vowel quality provides evidence for sex- and sexuality-differential linguistic behaviour in the advancement of the nasal vowel chain shift. The results confirm the progressive but non-conformative linguistic behaviour of women, both straight and queer, as outlined by Labov (1990) and numerous other sociolinguistic studies, but also indicate that queer men are centre-stage in driving the change forward. This research is a first step in formalizing data-driven principles about the linguistic behaviour of sexual minorities and their role in language change, akin to the principles advanced to account for the behaviour of women.

This perceptual-dialectology study investigates how listener-related social factors impact the geographical recognition of regional accents. In contrast to much prior research on English, our focus is on Dutch, which lends itself well to our study, allowing for notable regional accents within a well-defined standard language. Using a map-based recognition task in which 1,578 listeners placed forty representative speakers on a map based on fragments of their speech, we investigated the regional biases in accent recognition and the extent to which each listener’s awareness of these depends on their familiarity and proximity. Education, geographical knowledge, and distance to listeners’ own regions significantly predicted their accent-recognition accuracy. Moreover, we found a curvilinear age effect, which we interpret in terms of age-related changes in geographical and social mobility. We show how these effects in our design lead to meaningful accent-recognition patterns in groups of listeners.

The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems like the Low-Back-Merger Shift. We chart such change in acoustic data from seven generations of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels affected by both the SVS and LBMS (dress, trap), plus price and face, known respectively to monophthongize and centralize in the SVS, and LBMS-implicated lot/thought. The SVS is most advanced among Georgians born in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in face-centralization. In Generation X, retraction of front lax vowels begins, leading toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels, support findings that regional vowel systems declined precipitously following a Gen X “cliff,” raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in demographic transformations of that time period.

We investigate the impact of medium of communication (in-person versus video) on intraspeaker variation in conversation—a process we refer to as medium-shifting. To quantify the effects of medium-shifting and understand its possible motivations, we analyze three variables that show intraspeaker effects of “clear” or “careful” speech: articulation rate, density-controlled vowel space area, and (ING). The data come from matched in-person and video-mediated interviews with thirty-three repeat guests from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, recorded before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mixed-effects regression models show that compared to in-person interviews, video-mediated interviews involve a significantly lower articulation rate and larger vowel space, but no significant difference in (ING). The results suggest that speakers may engage in medium-shifting in order to enhance their intelligibility over video, for example, through more precise articulatory movements and greater contrast between phonemic vowel categories. The null effect of medium on (ING) further suggests that medium-shifting is a motivator of intraspeaker differences even within a single contextual style. An emergent extralinguistic factor affecting speaking behavior and choices, medium-shifting should be carefully considered especially when designing variationist research involving mixed media interviews.

This article uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate the indexical fields of two variables, one phonological (rhoticity) and one morphosyntactic (past tense be), in oral history interviews with speakers from Oldham (Greater Manchester, UK), born between 1907 and 1929. In a quantitative analysis of the variation, we account for a range of linguistic constraints, and find some evidence suggesting that rhoticity does not tend to cooccur with nonstandard past tense be. To investigate this further, we employ a modified version of the Lectal Focusing in Interaction method (Sharma & Rampton 2015; Sharma 2018), allowing us to track the speakers’ variation in interaction. Using this method, we explore the indexical fields of the variables, which we suggest are potentially in conflict, perhaps explaining the observed pattern of non-cooccurrence. Overall, our analysis demonstrates how the status of rhoticity and past tense be in relation to prescribed standard English, as well as shifting and stable variables, influences their indexical potential in interaction.

This paper examines final /z/ devoicing among Chicanx teens in Southern California to investigate the degree to which devoiced final /z/ neutralizes with final /s/ in this dialect. Results indicate on the one hand that devoiced /z/ remains distinct from /s/: as expected, devoiced /z/ is significantly less voiceless than /s/ and has a significantly lower center of gravity (COG). However, unexpectedly, devoiced /z/ has a significantly longer fricative duration and a significantly shorter preceding vowel duration than /s/, a pair of results that run counter to general tendencies for voiced fricatives to be shorter and have longer preceding vowels than their voiceless counterparts. We propose that these durational findings may explain, at least in part, the salience of final /z/ devoicing in Latinx Englishes despite its ubiquity among speakers of mainstream US English. In this first instrumental sociophonetic account of final /z/ devoicing in Latinx Englishes, we also find that, counter to existing segmental accounts, the morphological status of /z/ is no longer a significant predictor of devoicing. Moreover, while both following segment and speaker gender are significant predictors of devoicing, they do not condition devoicing in the expected ways.

This paper presents the first sociophonetic study of Sanapaná (Enlhet-Enenlhet), spoken by around one thousand people in Paraguay. It examines the effects of L2 (Spanish/Guaraní) fluency and loss of L1 exposure on vowel quality and within-category variability of /e, o/ productions in the Sanapaná /e, a, o/ system. Data from eleven native Sanapaná speakers suggest that age and multilingualism may have little explanatory power by themselves. Speakers living in a majority-L2 environment show greater within-category variability and increased convergence of /e, o/ toward the L2 high vowels /i, u/ than daily users of Sanapaná. This suggests that decreased L1 exposure is the main factor driving language shift-related change in Sanapaná. I explain these findings in an exemplar-theoretic framework. Although the number of speakers sampled is limited, these data provide a valuable addition to our knowledge of sociolinguistic variation in small, underrepresented communities.

This project uses GIS mapping to analyze spatial trends in spoken language, testing how features identified as part of the “Southern dialect” by the Atlas of North American English (ANAE; Labov et al., 2006) are used in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS; Kretzschmar et al., 2013). We analyze vowel mergers, diphthongization, monophthongization, fronting, and several consonantal features. Rather than drawing isoglosses, we use local spatial autocorrelation analysis to reveal subregional patterning in the data. We present a series of maps illustrating the realization of Southern speech features as enumerated by ANAE. We find little evidence for ANAE’s Inland South region based on acoustics, and while some areas surveyed in DASS align well with the portrayal of Southern speech presented by ANAE, others do not.

We propose a rapid adaptation of FAVE-Align to the Nordic languages, and we offer our own adaptation to Swedish as a template. This study is motivated by the fact that researchers of lesser-studied languages often neither have sufficient speech material nor sufficient time to train a forced aligner. Faced with a similar problem, we made a limited number of surface changes to FAVE-Align so that it – along with its original hidden Markov models for English – could be used on Stockholm Swedish. We tested the performance of this prototype on the three main sociolects of Stockholm Swedish and found that read-aloud alignments met all of the minimal benchmarks set by the literature. Spontaneous-speech alignments met three of the four minimal benchmarks. We conclude that an adaptation such as ours would especially suit laboratory experiments in Nordic phonetics that rely on elicited speech.