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The status of the U.S. Midland as a separate dialect area has been a topic of discussion for quite some time, and Murray and Simon (2006b) strive for resolution by defining the Midland as a dialect area characterized by a core set of seventeen morpho-syntactic features that co-occur in the region but are not necessarily used by all or only Midlanders. In this article, the author argues that need + prepositional adverb (e.g., The dog needs out) belongs among the features of the Midland and presents data to show that this construction parallels the regional, social, and stylistic distributions of other Midland constructions. In addition, the author proposes that need + prepositional adverb has indirect links to Scotch-Irish English and is likely a U.S. or, at the very least, a recent innovation that arose by analogy to other Scotch-Irish features. Finally, need + prepositional adverb is a modern Midland feature that provides evidence against the Midland as simply a transition zone.

Self-reports in linguistic study, which were central to the dialect surveys of the twentieth century, have, by and large, been relegated to the sidelines by more advanced sociolinguistic techniques in recent years. This article probes into the validity of written self-report surveys in relation to the fieldwork method for Vancouver, British Columbia. Confirming Chambers’s general findings of equivalence, it produces insights into the preferred length of written questionnaires and offers recommendations as to question type. The present article also compares the written questionnaire results to acoustically analyzed recorded data for yod-dropping and the low-back vowels before /r/, identifying linguistic items that correlate well with results from self-reports and those that fail to produce reliable results because of ongoing linguistic change or reindexicalization in the case of yod-dropping. Overall, written self-report surveys are found to be highly reliable data gathering tools if certain factors are kept in mind.

In this article, the authors provide a diachronic analysis of the urr variable as it appears in African American English (AAE) spoken in St. Louis. While many believe that this linguistic feature is a product of hip-hop, invented recently for creative purposes, the authors provide linguistic evidence that shows it to be a prevalent feature of dialects of AAE spoken in St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois, at an earlier time. The authors suggest that the increase in vowel centralization that evolved in St. Louis is similar to that found in Memphis, Tennessee, along an s-curve pattern. Finally, the authors theorize about how the use of the urr variable by hip-hop artists correlates with its increased usage in present-day local communities. They employ notions of indexicality, meaning making, acts of identity, and accommodation to argue for linguistic convergence between St. Louis rappers and local communities. They argue that the increased usage and acceptance of vowel centralization in local communities is supported by hip-hop language as opposed to innovated through it.

In accommodation contexts where dialects already contain extensive overlap, the processes of convergence/divergence may be better specified in terms of the “expansion” and “reduction” of linguistic variation. Among emerging adults at Southern Illinois University, contact between South Midland and Northern Cities speakers illustrates that accommodation of variation in the /u/, /o/, /æ/, and / / vowels is expressed not through the wholesale adoption of new forms but rather through an expansion or reduction of the range of previously existing forms. By providing this alternative view, this study mitigates the competing discussions regarding the primary importance of speaker identity/attitudes versus frequency of interaction by allowing both a role in shaping the outcomes of dialect contact and accommodation. The author suggests that the mechanisms of expansion and reduction in accommodation are echoic of more general processes in language contact and language change.

This article investigates the relationship between the Boston speech community and two New Hampshire (NH) speech communities with respect to the phonetic status of short-a. Analysis of twenty-six recordings shows that (1) breaking is more prevalent in New England than previous isoglosses suggest and (2) younger NH speakers are exhibiting a pattern distinct from both Boston and older NH speakers. The author suggests that the latter result is related to migration patterns and geographic attitudes in New England, which may have contributed to dialect leveling in the sense of Kerswill.

Nonlinguists prove surprisingly good at recognizing dialects, even as dialects rapidly evolve. During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s speech was intensely discussed among linguists, the media, and laypeople. Though Palin is from Alaska, her speech was often identified with the Upper Midwest.The authors explore what this mismatch can tell us about dialects and their perception, starting from a description of Palin’s speech as commented on in the media.They review some pragmatic features and provide quantitative treatment of her “g-dropping.” Then, they undertake acoustic analysis of Palin’s vowels and final /z/ devoicing, including Western features and features that create an impression of her speech as Upper Midwestern. Regional settlement history, research on “new dialect formation,” and research on perception of variation inform the authors’ finding that a few acoustic and other characteristics trigger a specific national perception of Palin’s verbal behavior.

This paper investigates the use of local accent and dialect features in the performance of Arctic Monkeys, a very successful indie band from Sheffield in the north of England. Previous work on variation in the sung pronunciation of British pop musicians by Trudgill (1983) and Simpson (1999) is reviewed. A qualitative analysis of an Arctic Monkeys performance is carried out to determine the extent to which features of northern and/or more specifically Sheffield English are used by Arctic Monkeys. The results are then discussed within a language-ideological framework, where it is argued that Arctic Monkeys are using features of local accent and dialect to index values such as authenticity and independence from the corporate machine.

The regional, social, and stylistic distributions of want + prepositional adverb (e.g., I can move if you want by) are poorly understood in spite of a long history of documentation and the inclusion of one form— want off—in major dialectology projects . This article investigates the acceptability of a range of forms of want + prepositional adverb in the United States and finds a wider than expected regional distribution, differences in the acceptability of different forms, and in the dialect area that boasts the greatest concentration of use—the Midland—little variation across social variables yet greater variation across styles. The author argues that the findings support the use of acceptability judgments in the study of morpho-syntactic features; indicate change from below in progress with the spread of want + prepositional adverb from the Midland; give additional evidence for an independent Midland dialect area; and call into question current assumptions about the relationship between social and stylistic variation.

A current suggestion in the variationist literature is that the predominance of forms like we was in nonstandard varieties of English is predictable in that was-generalization represents a case of the “default singular.” I argue that while the principle of the default singular is a sound one, it is not appropriate as an explanation for was-generalization. What is involved is not a matter of singular versus plural but of r-forms of the past tense of to be versus s-forms, with forms like were, war , wor representing the r-variant and was, wiz , wus the s-variant. The ancient Germanic s/r alternation has been leveled out in most dialects over the past millennium. Examination of Germanic dialects shows that in very many cases, it is the r-forms that have survived. If some general principle were at work, we would expect s-forms to predominate. The history of the Germanic dialects as a whole shows that we are dealing with analogical leveling that does not especially favor either the s-forms or the r-forms. The term default singular has no explanatory value in this case.

Taking as a point of departure the preliminary view of regional phonetic differentiation in Canadian English developed by the Atlas of North American English, this article presents data from a new acoustic-phonetic study of regional variation in Canadian English carried out by the author at McGill University. While the Atlas analyzes mostly spontaneous speech data from thirty-three speakers covering a broad social range, the present study analyzes word list data from a larger number of speakers (eighty-six) drawn from a narrower social range, comprising young, university-educated speakers of Standard Canadian English from all across the country. The new data set permits a more detailed view of regional variation within Canada than was possible in the Atlas, which focuses on differentiating Canadian from neighboring varieties of American English. This view adds detail to the established account in some respects, while suggesting a revised regional taxonomy of Canadian English in others. In particular, this article reports on several phonetic isoglosses that divide Canada's Prairie region from Ontario, thereby splitting the “Inland Canada” region of the Atlas into western and eastern halves. In fact, the data presented here suggest a division of Standard Canadian English into six regions at the phonetic level, rather than the three proposed by the Atlas: British Columbia, the Prairies, Ontario, Quebec (Montreal), the Maritimes, and Newfoundland. This taxonomy corresponds to the six major regions identified in the study of lexical data reported in Boberg (2005b).

This article shows that individuals in groups with tight-knit and dense social networks display considerable variation, despite the fact that they share a set of common social characteristics. Drawing on case studies from Tristan da Cunha English, spoken on a South Atlantic island, interindividual variation is traced in two members of the same family, who have identical social backgrounds and are in frequent face-to-face contact with each other. Results from a quantitative analysis of four selected variables and the evaluation of a perceptual dialectology study are interpreted in terms of their relevance for accommodation theory, social network theory, and mobility-related effects on language change. The study thus examines the role of individual variation and seeks to provide explanations for individuation (i.e., unexpected patterns of language usage on a micro level in single speakers), outlining its general relevance for sociolinguistic theory.

This study applies quantitative techniques—measures of linguistic distance, cluster analysis, principal components analysis, and regression analysis—to data on English speech variants in England and America. The analysis yields measures of similarity among English and American speakers, distinguishes clusters of speakers with similar speech patterns, and isolates groups of variants that distinguish those groups of speakers. The results are consistent with a model of new-dialect formation in the American colonies, involving competition within and selection from a pool of variants introduced by speakers from different dialect regions. The patterns of similarity appear to be largely consistent with the historical evidence of migrations from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain to North America, lending support to the hypothesis of regional English origins for some important differences in American dialects, and suggesting mainly southeastern English influence on American speech, with somewhat greater southeastern influence on New England speech and southwestern influence in the American South.

Research on African American English (AAE) since 1998 has covered topics ranging from origins of the variety to formal semantic computations used to explain the different readings of ambiguous sentences. Much of the work on AAE during this period, especially that related to the origins debate, is in the variation theory framework. The focus of the descriptive research has been on syntactic and semantic patterns in AAE used by speakers in the adolescent to adult age group. While research on phonological patterns and formal semantics of constructions has lagged behind other areas, some noteworthy studies in these areas have appeared since 1998. As the discussion of AAE has broadened, it has been possible to compare data and approaches in different studies and raise questions that provide more insight into the linguistic variety. It is also possible to extend descriptive analyses of different constructions to use in illustrations of the systematic nature of language in introductory linguistics courses and in linguistics and education courses.

Although several researchers have noted unusual phonetic realizations of s, there is little detailed documentation of such variation. This study investigates the use of a fronted variant of s in the speech of Auckland, New Zealand, residents. The results report on the findings from a rapid survey that elicits tokens of s in word-final position in the speech of 638 Pakeha (New Zealand European) speakers. The findings provide evidence of both a fronted and nonfronted variant of s in this community. The findings also show systematic variation on the basis of age, gender, and occupation, with the fronted variant preferred by younger speakers, professional females, and males in clerical jobs.

Approximately 20 percent of the original settlers to New Zealand came from Scotland, and Scottish influence is still visible around New Zealand and in New Zealand English (NZE) vocabulary. But the phonological systems of NZE and Scottish English are so different that it is difficult to see any residual influence of the early Scottish settlers in New Zealand pronunciation today. In this study, the authors use a database of historical recordings held in the Origins of New Zealand English project to track the possible influence of the early Scottish settlers on modern NZE phonology. They show that although the centralized vowel in the lexical set of KIT is not a legacy from the early Scottish settlers, Scottish English nevertheless had a discernible influence as NZE developed out of the initial dialect-contact situation in which the first European settlers found themselves.