According to census data, the North-East of Scotland is one of the strongholds of the Scots language. However, its “Doric” dialect is undergoing change, with linguistic studies reporting a loss of traditional dialect features. This article focuses on Inverurie—a town whose population has increased almost threefold since the 1950s as it has become an important commuter hub for Aberdeen.

By comparing perceptions of older and younger speakers, the results of this study support accounts of a shift away from the region’s distinctive dialect, observed through weakening of the perceived urban/rural divide, youngsters’ lack of identification with traditional identity labels, and—most importantly—differing accuracy rates when geographically placing a speech sample from an older resident. Conversely, the fact that such results are not found among youngsters surveyed in some other North-East communities suggests that linguistic change may be afoot at different paces in different parts of the region.

Within-region geographical variation in Canadian Englishes has rarely been investigated on a large scale. This is at least in part due to claims of Canadian “Englishes” being largely geographically homogeneous (Chambers, 2004; Boberg, 2010; Denis, 2020), despite evidence of regional variation (Dollinger, 2019). Here, we build on older literature that documented regional variation in English spoken in British Columbia (BC). We focus on two regions in BC—the Okanagan and the Lower Mainland—examining four phonological patterns: pre-velar raising of kit, dress, and trap, and Canadian Raising of price. Using Generalized Additive Mixed Models, we find regional differences in vowel pronunciation patterns for pre-velar raising of the examined front vowels and for Canadian Raising of price. Both regions engage in Canadian Raising and pre-velar raising. From that lens, the regions are homogeneous. However, the patterns are produced in regionally specific ways, providing further evidence that regional variation exists within smaller geographical areas in Canadian English. Overall, this challenges the claims of homogeneity for English spoken in Canada and more generally invites an interrogation of what homogeneity means.

In Val Camonica, northern Italy, questions can be made with a ‘do’-support construction. Frequency of ‘do’-support use with activity and stative verbs is measured for various valley dialects through an elicitation experiment. This reveals how use varies from low-frequency, highly optional, and mostly restricted to activity verbs; to high-frequency and obligatory with almost all verbs. The pattern is interpreted as two ends of a grammaticalization chain, from a near lexical ‘do’-support verb to a bleached shell. Geographically, results demonstrate consistent generalization and grammaticalization of ‘do’-support along the valleys, the less grammaticalized, primitive form in the contact zones with other valley dialects, and the more advanced, grammaticalized form in the isolated locations. This is related to the connections between communities, social networks of the speakers, and their attitudes towards or against the ‘do’-support form. It shows how grammaticalization proceeds naturally in the absence of restraining forces.

To assess the possibility of regiolect formation, we evaluated the pronunciation similarity between Frisian, Town Frisian, and Low Saxon varieties between the 1980s and 2020s. This included comparing their similarity to Standard Dutch over time. Speakers in 32 locations in both periods translated a Standard Dutch word list into their local dialect. The corresponding recordings were transcribed and consequently analyzed using the Levenshtein distance. We found evidence of regiolect formation in the Frisian and northern Low Saxon areas. Strong convergence to Standard Dutch was found in the areas bordering the Hollandic dialect area and one area in the province of Overijssel. An in-depth analysis showed that low- and high-frequency words were most likely to change and that speaker characteristics interact with convergence and divergence patterns. The findings confirm the importance of including multiple speakers per dialect location and accounting for speaker characteristics in dialectological research.

An avenue for the progress of areal linguistics in South America is the investigation of the geographical distribution of specific features, such as the expression of sociative causation. Sociative causation is a particular type of causation where the causer not only makes the causee do an action but also participates in it (Shibatani & Pardeshi, 2002). Guillaume & Rose (2010) hypothesize that dedicated sociative causative markers are an areal feature of South America, in particular western South America. The aim of the present paper is to reassess the spatial distribution of these markers based on a large worldwide sample of 325 languages. The results show that dedicated sociative causative markers are significantly more frequent in South America compared to the rest of the world.

This contribution presents a perceptual dialectology study conducted with 123 Albanian-speaking participants, who rated the correctness and pleasantness of speech around Albania. We investigate how ratings were modulated by three factors: a well-established dialectal division within Albania, relative urbanization across the country, and the participants’ dialect backgrounds. These three factors were found to interact in the correctness and pleasantness ratings given by the participants, which is generally consistent with previous perceptual dialectology studies conducted in other linguistic settings but also highlights some nuances and complexities in this relationship. While heavily urbanized centers in central Albania were rated as highly correct and pleasant independently from prior dialect descriptions or dialect background of the participants, in one dialect area, less urbanized counties were rated more pleasant. We argue that these insights from non-linguists could serve as starting point for future scientific inquiry.

One of the peculiarities of Falkland Islands toponymy is its multilingual character: French, English, and Spanish names coexist throughout the archipelago serving as a reminder of its busy history. American Spanish gaucho place names were coined after the British settlement in 1833. These toponyms mostly identify inland locations, reflecting the new practical need for orientation, delimitation, and land management for the livestock business of the new colony. However, such place names have not yet received exclusive attention. Until now they have been only mentioned in gazetteers with reference to their Spanish origin. The present work resorts to both traditional toponymic approaches and fieldwork to identify toponyms, understand how they work, and analyze how Islanders perceive them. This is done under the assumption that studying Islanders’ attitudes contributes to revealing historical facts as well as relationships between the Islands and the mainland.

In this article, we aim to reconcile the interrelated role of social and spatial influences on colloquial German by conducting an apparent-time analysis of 15 lexical, morphological, and phonetic variables from the Atlas of Colloquial German (AdA). Specifically, we introduce a “change in variation intensity” (CVI) measure meant to gauge the degree of change in colloquial speech between younger and older cohorts. Using this measure, we investigate (a) whether the CVI within and across variables is prone to spatial patterns and (b) the extent to which the CVI differs systematically between variable types. Results from visual–spatial analyses indicate clear spatial patterns, though the geographical distributions are largely item-specific, and a linear mixed-effects model revealed no effect of variable type. More broadly, the CVI measure represents an important advancement in how we address language variation and change from a methodological-statistical perspective, specifically when dealing with heterogeneous, crowdsourced data.

New Orleans English (NOE) demonstrates a distinctive combination of NYC-linked and South-linked linguistic features. In a matched guise dialect classification task, listeners were presented with NOE audio featuring either only NYC-linked features, only South-linked features, or a combination of the two, and asked to identify where the speaker was from. When faced with only NYC-linked features or only South-linked features, listeners consistently identified the speaker as being from the targeted locale and accessed associated social stereotypes—suggesting that, in isolation, these NOE features are indeed perceived as being linked to NYC and the South, respectively. When presented with conflicting linguistic cues, listeners enacted several strategies: “settling” on a geographic identification aligned with one or more of the linguistic cues and ignoring incongruent cues, shifting the geographic location to a middle-ground between these North/South poles, or compromising between sociolinguistic aspects of two locations to “find” a persona that fits with both signals.

We present and evaluate the map-based accent-recognition task, in which listeners place speech fragments of regionally accented Netherlandic Standard Dutch on a map in a browser-based experiment. On the basis of 15,780 accent placements (from 1,578 participants), we demonstrate that this task successfully elicits listener associations between speech and space, which are mediated by listeners’ sociolinguistic representations. We subsequently assess the task’s validity by comparing the listeners’ map-based associations with objective dialectological distances: results show a significant correlation between production and perception and hence establish convergent validity. Finally, we use a hierarchical cluster analysis to map out listeners’ perceptual isoglosses. These reveal that the accent placements largely clustered along the province boundaries, but with dialectologically motivated deviations and subcategorizations. We discuss methodological implications for perceptual dialectology and sociolinguistic implications for Dutch.