The article revisits Schneider and Schröder’s (2021) assessment of Namibian English (NamE) as a ‘non‑postcolonial’ variety that has moved from a phase of diffuse normative input into a yet uncompleted Phase 3 (‘nativization’) and that – due to ‘ethnic variation’ – remains well short of displaying the ‘homogeneity’ expected of Phase 4 (‘endonormative stabilization’). The article examines the historical record and draws on both perceptual and linguistic datasets collected across Namibian ethnolinguistic groups. The historical record suggests that early NamE was likely not distinct from South African English (SAE), at least in its high‑status varieties, during a period in which SAE moved through Phase 2 into the end of Phase 3. This creates the expectation that, in its high‑status varieties, NamE orbits around inherited SAE models. However, based on the datasets, (urban) NamE seems to have somewhat drifted away from SAE and moved into Phase 4 by displaying some distinctive pragmatic markers and a distinctive high‑status phonetic variety, both with considerable cross‑ethnic diffusion. Importantly, this transition into Phase 4 does not preclude ethnic variation nor continued alignment with SAE’s historically normative varieties in some sections of the population. The article finally argues that transitions into Phase 4 are best established by examining the role of English in local accommodation practices and stratified patterns of variation across gender and social class, likely to reveal the location of (endogenous or exogenous) high‑status norms on the social spectrum and degrees of consensus around them.

This article analyzes the sociophonetic dynamics of the acquisition of a prestige variety of English in post-apartheid South Africa. New economic and educational opportunities have seen the rapid growth of a Black middle class, whose younger members have increasingly come into contact with what used to be ‘(L1) White South African English’. The article documents the differences among younger Black peoples’ English from the traditional L2 of their parents’ generation, via acoustic analyses of two sets of variables: schwa as a full vowel, and neutralizations of vowel length. At the same time there is considerable internal difference among younger Black speakers in relation to social class and gender. The finding that young Black women are in the lead in acquiring the prestige variety is triangulated with a perception experiment and citations from commentaries in the press and young peoples’ own attitudes.

This article reports on patterns in the production and perception of New Zealand English r-sandhi. We report on two phoneme-monitoring experiments that examine whether listeners from three regions are sensitive to the distribution of r-presence in linking and intrusive environments. The results provide evidence that sound perception is affected by a listener's experience-driven expectations: greater prior experience with a sound in a given context increases the likelihood of perceiving the sound in that context, regardless of whether the sound is present in the stimulus. For listeners with extremely limited prior exposure to a variant, the variant is especially salient and we also observe an experiment-internal effect of experience. We argue that our results support models that incorporate both word-specific and abstract probabilistic representations.

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.

Despite growing interest in African varieties of French, few attempts have been made to examine them from a variationist perspective. This contribution aims to use phonetic variation as a vantage point for exploring language ideologies surrounding the use of French in postcolonial contexts. The study focuses on the French variety spoken in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and draws on a bilingual Lingala–French dataset elicited from L1 Lingala speakers. The sample reflects a key social distinction in Kinshasa: that between long-term urban residents and recent rural migrants. Are there multiple phonetic varieties of Kinshasa French? To what extent do their forms merely reflect variation in Lingala? The study finds that the most focused variety of Kinshasa French is strongly associated with urban women and is approximated to varying degrees by rural migrants, particularly women. In addition to features with likely origins in either rural or urban Lingala, Kinshasa French exhibits hypercorrect forms and features that may mirror variation trends in Parisian French.

If supposedly homophonous words were acoustically distinct despite sharing phonemic form, theories of mental storage may have to account for the consistent differences with separate storage for each homophone. Previous studies of the homophonous functions or word classes of the English word like showed such subphonemic differences between functions, though some studies also found effects of utterance context alongside these. Schleef & Turton (2018) argued that all these function effects reduce to context effects, since function is not independent of context – for example, quotative like typically occurs before a pause and thus is typically subject to lengthening because of its position, not due to a lexicalised acoustic distinction between functions. Testing this argument with new data from a different regional variety to those used by Schleef & Turton, we only find differences that can be explained by context, in line with their argument. This casts prior findings of acoustic distinctions between like functions in new light, and introduces the need for further research (especially including the frequency of different functions).

The trap vowel /æ/ is known to display a complex variable duration in many English dialects, but this phenomenon is understudied in Australian English. Previous analyses suggest that trap duration is sensitive to the effects of following phonetic environments in complex ways, but that a lexically specific effect may also operate in determining duration. This study aims to investigate phonetic and lexical effects through an acoustic analysis of trap duration in Australian English. Speakers from a range of areas in Sydney that vary in their ethnic and linguistic diversity produced the trap vowel in select phonetic contexts. Results suggest that trap exhibits a complex hierarchy of durations which are conditioned by the characteristics of the following coda, as well as a notably long duration in the affective adjectives mad and sad compared to other words with coda /d/ that were tested. However, these effects were found to be relatively less pronounced among speakers from more ethnically and linguistically diverse regions of Sydney. This may be attributed to high levels of language and dialect contact occurring in more diverse areas resulting in a gradual reduction in the degree of trap durational variability.

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.

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.

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.

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.