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Longitudinal tracking of second dialect acquisition normally requires carefully planned data collection and years of patience. However, the rise of self-recorded public speech data on internet archives such as YouTube affords researchers with a novel way of tracking language change over time. This article presents two case studies of YouTube vloggers who have recorded their voices over the course of a decade (or longer) and have also relocated from different dialect regions of the United States to the West Coast. It reveals that, in addition to typical age-graded change such as a decrease in fundamental frequency over time, some vocalic aspects of their original dialects (Hawai'i English and Inland North English) shifted to become more in line with Western American English, while others did not. The disparity between the vowels that changed and those that did not for each speaker are discussed through the lenses of social salience, gender and race, and the audience design of YouTube vlogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Format ties, "partial repetitions of prior talk" (Goodwin & Goodwin 1987, p. 207), are interesting from an interactional perspective with respect to their functions relating to, for example, (dis-) agreement/alignment or humour, and for scholars of Language Variation and Change because they offer uniquely comparable phonological contexts in naturalistic speech. The present paper investigates the distribution of the sociolinguistic variable ing in format ties in a set of dyadic interviews of six speakers from the North-East of England who were recorded two or three times throughout their twenties – those career-building years during which we often see a change from the predominant use of the alveolar variant ("in'") to the velar ("ing"). The analysis offers possible interactional and stylistic explanations for the community-level stability and the speaker-level variation and change of ing by focusing on contexts in which speakers format tie. It shows that the use of the highly frequent and thus less marked alveolar variant tends to occur in aligning contexts, while the few velar cases occur in moments where speakers disalign on some level. This argument contributes to work combining interactional and variationist endeavours, in particular with respect to the variable ing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do accent biases observed half a century ago (Giles 1970) and 15 years ago (Coupland and Bishop 2007) still hold in Britain today? We provide an updated picture of national attitudes to accent labels by replicating and extending previous studies. Mean ratings and relative rankings of 38 accents for prestige and pleasantness by a large representative sample of the British population (N = 821) attest to a remarkably stable, long-standing hierarchy of accent status. We find little evidence of demotion of conservative prestige varieties or reranking of accents, although we do observe a slight improvement in lower rankings. We focus in detail on age and life stage, finding that most of the age patterns observed in earlier studies were in fact instances of age-grading (lifespan effects), not real-time change in attitude. The midlife phase of life corresponds to conservative shifts in the perception of global, migrant-heritage, and stigmatised varieties. Our findings add change in speech evaluation to the growing body of research on lifespan change in speech production. Finally, although effects of ethnicity, social class, regional self- and other-bias, and age remain firmly in place, earlier gender differences in respondent behaviour have more or less disappeared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines, on the basis of a longitudinal corpus of 50 early modern authors, how change at the aggregate level of the community interacts with variation and change at the micro-level of the individual language user. In doing so, this study aims to address the methodological gap between collective change and entrenchment, that is, the gap between language as a social phenomenon and the cognitive processes responsible for the continuous reorganization of linguistic knowledge in individual speakers. Taking up the case of the prepositional passive, this study documents a strong community-wide increase in use that is accompanied by increasing schematicity. A comparison of the 50 authors reveals that regularities arising at the macro-level conceal highly complex and variable individual behavior, aspects of which may be explained by studying the larger (social) context in which these individuals operate (e. g., age cohorts, community of practice, biographical insights). Further analysis, focusing on how authors use the prepositional passive in unique and similar ways, elucidates the role of small individual biases in long-term change. Overall, it is demonstrated that language change is an emergent phenomenon that results from the complex interaction between individual speakers, who themselves may change their linguistic behavior to varying degrees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vowel height can be seen as a feature indexing a particular ethnic identity or indicating a style shift between two such identities. This paper focuses on Bradford-born South Asian musician Zayn Malik, an interesting subject given his prominent status as one of the most influential Asians in Britain today (Parveen 2016). I consider the role of vowel raising in the GOAT lexical set (Wells 1982) over the period of 2010 to 2016 and in style-shifting between casual, interview, and performative styles. The results of my study indicate significant differences in F1 and F2 values between particular years, and differences in F1 values between performative and interview speech. I explore these shifts in relation to the hostility Malik has faced and study the causes of his shifting, particularly in terms of speaker agency and audience design (Bell 1984).

The traditional focus of variationist sociolinguistic research is the patterning of language variation at the level of the community, which individual language users are said to learn and reproduce (Labov 1972; 2012). In this paper, I observe that, although members of a speech community may all have learned the same grammar of a sociolinguistic variable, they may nonetheless produce that variable in ways which obscure this. This “perturbation,” I argue, is epiphenomenal, stemming from at least two possible sources: individual differences in mental representations, and individual differences in speech production planning. Moreover, I demonstrate that these differences are not only inter-individual; they can also be intra-individual, such that speakers may undergo age-grading which disrupts their patterning of a variable from how they previously produced it. I ask whether these individual differences may give rise to changes in constraints in the same way that individual differences can lead to sound change. The paper concludes with a call for more research that integrates sociolinguistic, formal, and psycholinguistic approaches to the study of language variation and change.

This paper reviews theoretical and methodological advances and issues in lifespan research and discusses how the issues at stake are addressed in an ongoing research project. Summarizing the state of the art, we conclude that next to nothing is known about lifespan changes affecting syntactic or grammaticalizing constructions that goes beyond exploratory or anecdotal evidence. The Mind-Bending Grammars project, which examines the adaptive powers of adult cognition and constraints on these powers, aspires to make headway in this area. In this paper, we introduce some of the major goals of the project and present a new large-scale longitudinal corpus of 50 adults that was established to study grammatical change across the lifespan. Particular attention is paid to the constraints on the adoption of novel grammatical patterns in the aging mind. Taking be going to as a case study, we present evidence that (highly educated) healthy monolingual speakers continue to participate in grammatical innovations across the lifespan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The BIT, BING, BET, BAT, BAN, BOOK, and BUT vowels of ten Utah English speakers (born 1883–1928) were analyzed over the course of several decades of their adult lives. Most speakers participated in the Western Vowel System by lowering BIT and BET, retracting BAT, and raising BAN, with some fronting BOOK and BUT. Speakers generally did not exhibit monotonic change across the years from expected positions for BET, BAT, and BAN, and for the most part for BOOK and BUT; however, most speakers showed change with regard to BIT, though speakers differed from each other on the direction of change. Even for those vowels with no consistent direction of intraindividual change, however, in many cases speakers were inconsistent in their production from year to year. Further, speakers' envelopes of variation were different for various vowels, with the widest range of intraindividual variation in BET and BAT, less variation in BAN and BUT, and little in BIT and BOOK. It is suggested that the envelope of variation is at least as much as an important issue for studies of linguistic behavior across adulthood as any actual shift in linguistic behavior across real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the speech of Cheryl Fernandez-Versini (nee Tweedy, formerly Cole), henceforth “Cheryl” , who experienced rapid geographical and socioeconomic mobility between 2002 and 2014. In 2002, Cheryl was a working-class 19-year-old from Newcastle Upon Tyne, north-east England. Since then, she has risen to fame on the talent show Popstars: The Rivals , in the girl band Girls Aloud , through her marriage to footballer Ashley Cole, and through her work as a judge on The X Factor , among other things. This paper seeks to analyse the effect this has had on her accent. Four recordings between 2002 and the present day are analysed to discuss changes to her original Tyneside English (TE) accent, specifically through the changing phonetics of the FACE and the GOAT vowels. These changes are discussed in terms of both the TE speech community and Cheryl’s personal experiences. The two vowels have traditional diphthongs in TE which are different from the diphthongs in Received Pronunciation (RP). However, these vowels have been found to be undergoing dialect levelling, with many TE speakers producing them as the monophthongs found in the rest of the North (Watt 2000, 2002). The paper therefore investigates whether Cheryl follows the pattern of other TE speakers or moves towards RP. The recordings used are taken from online videos of interviews. The first time point studied is 2002, when Cheryl first rose to fame through Popstars: The Rivals , in which her GOAT and FACE vowels are shown to be the Northern monophthongs which have resulted from dialect levelling in TE. The intermediate time points studied are 2006 and 2011. In 2006, Cheryl was engaged to Ashley Cole and had been living and working in the south of England for 4 years. Both vowels move closer to RP in position but remain monophthongal. The 2011 recording is an interview in the US, during Cheryl’s brief career on American X Factor. The data for this time point are particularly interesting as the position of the vowels varies more, and the average position of both vowels does not fit the pattern of change, indicating style-shifting. The 2014 recording was the most recent interview of substantial length which could be found at the time of data collection. The analysis shows that Cheryl’s GOAT vowel is significantly closer to RP than it was in 2002, despite remaining a monophthong, while her FACE vowel appears to have become a diphthong as in RP. The results show that Cheryl does undergo lifespan change in these two vowels, being closer to RP at the time of writing than in 2002. However, the two intermediate time points studied show that these vowels do not change in parallel, as predicted by Watt (2000). The intermediate time points, in particular the 2011 data, give support to the conclusions of Rickford and Price (2013) and Bowie (2009) that in order to fully understand data on lifespan change, intermediate time points and factors other than age must be taken into account.

This research paper examines how language change can occur across the lifespan through the linguistic analysis of East Londoner, and world renowned football player, David Beckham. Specifically, we look at his use of the consonantal variables of t-glottaling and h-dropping and how the frequency of these forms change over a 20-year period. We discuss the background of the linguistic phenomena under investigation and the common environments in which these non-standard variants are likely to occur. We also take a closer look at how the forms are being used in certain phonotactic environments, for example, word-medial and word-final positions, and the potential reasons behind them being less common when preceding or following certain sounds. We discuss some common theories associated with language change across the lifespan, using quantitative data to find trends and qualitative interpretation to suggest social causes for our findings. The paper allows us to critically evaluate language change theories, such as Labov’ s (1978) apparent time theory. In designing our study, we hypothesised that Beckham would be seen to undergo linguistic change from his classic East London Cockney features to more prestigious forms. As t-glottaling and h-dropping are stigmatised forms which are commonly associated with a working-class background, we believed that Beckham would go from using a high rate of these variants in his teenage years, due to his lower socioeconomic background, to producing standard /t/ and /h/ more frequently, reflecting his dramatic upward social climb. Due to his rise to fame, we expected that his celebrity status would bring an added pressure to speak in a “correct” manner, therefore influencing Beckham to opt for the standard variants more frequently. The variants we looked at are also commonly associated with younger speakers, so we expected Beckham’ s aging to further affect his language. Our results support our hypothesis, showing the extent to which David Beckham’s language choices have changed over time. We found that he showed a significant decrease in both h-dropping and t-glottaling in all phonotactic environments. However, we also found a surprisingly high rate of t-glottalisation before consonants and after vowels in Beckham’ s 2014 recordings. Our data support theories concerning age, social class, sex and dialect convergence. Overall, our paper offers insight into the methodology and theory surrounding language change across the lifespan through the analysis of particular linguistics variables of an English speaker.

Over time, second language (L2) speech production changes as the learner gains more experience with the language. Factors such as interaction with native speakers of the learner’s L2 are known to play an important role. It is less clear to what extent, if at all, aspects of social identity influence the development of the L2 (Hansen Edwards 2008:372– 373). This longitudinal study examines the development of the actor Jackie Chan’s L2 (English) phonology. His speech production in two time periods 9 years apart is contrasted: in 1998, before he gained success in the English-speaking world; and in 2007, after he had released multiple Hollywood blockbusters. To check that factors such as age of acquisition were not the only reason for a lack of alignment over time towards English native-speaker norms, another context was taken from 2007, namely, an interview with a French native speaker. In foreigner-directed speech, there exists a pressure to produce more standard variants (Zuengler 1991:234). If Chan uses fewer non-standard variants with a non-native English speaker than with a native English speaker, it would imply that there is some degree of intent in his usage of non-standard forms and that his development, or lack thereof, is not only due to uncontrollable factors of second language acquisition. Two variables are examined: his production of stops in word-final codas containing a single stop and in wordfinal consonant clusters containing a stop as the final consonant. Native speakers of English generally pronounce these stops, whereas native speakers of Chinese often simplify them by deleting or glottalising them (Setter et al. 2010:15, Hansen 2001:340). In 2007, Chan is found to use a greater rate of the standard non-simplified variant than previously; however, he also simplifies his pronunciation by deleting the stop in the codas more often than in 1998. He uses standard forms that align with English native speakers to a greater extent when talking to non-native speakers. After 9 years of working in Hollywood, he would have gained more experience with English due to his social network consisting of more English native speakers, resulting in the expected increased alignment with native-speaker norms. However, his English has developed so that the non-standard variant of deletion is also used to a greater extent; the usage of this variant emphasises Chan’s identity as a Chinese native speaker. This emphasis is possible because of his success in between the two time periods: not only does he no longer have to align as much as possible with English native speakers so as to appeal to the English-speaking market, his success as a specifically Chinese martial artist means that highlighting his identity as a Chinese native speaker has more linguistic capital. Thus, it seems that factors of an L2 learner’s social identity do indeed influence the acquisition and development of their L2.

Over the past few years, academics such as Sankoff and Blondeau (2007) and Harrington (2006) have exhibited a marked interest in dialect variation and language change across the lifespan. Though it was acknowledged that individuals could temporarily adapt their language to accommodate to other interlocutors, permanent changes to their underlying grammar were previously thought impossible. What has come to light, however, is that as individuals we have been given increasing opportunities to be much more mobile; and as a result, our language has too. The aim of this study is to provide evidence for the claim that social and geographical mobility (in this case geographical) can cause an individual’s language to change. It was motivated by the belief that language cannot change after an individual has surpassed the critical period. The study focuses on one individual speaker in particular: the musician Ringo Starr. The speaker in question lived in Liverpool until the age of 40, before relocating to America. The data for this investigation were sourced from a number of TV and Radio interviews with Starr, taken from 20 years prior to and 20 years after his geographic relocation. In both cases, the interlocutors were speakers of British and American English varieties. The study examines three stable variables that exist in the speaker’s native dialect of Liverpool English — realisation of /t/ to /r/, non-rhoticity, and NURSE ~ SQUARE merger — and investigates whether these remain stable features, are lost completely, or are altered by geographical relocation. The study found that, although the speaker did not lose any features of his native dialect completely, the salience of the variables was affected by the move to the US. The speaker reduced his levels of /t/ to /r/ realisation and became more rhotic in certain phonological and lexical contexts. He retained the NURSE ~ SQUARE merger, but the results showed that he increased his frequency of F1 of NURSE vowels, articulating them slightly lower. Starr never acquired new, American variables such as the alveolar flap. What these results demonstrate is that an individual is capable of changing their language after the supposed “critical period”; it shows that not all change can be attributed to temporary accommodation. Dialect contact with varieties of American English appears to have resulted in some changes to Starr’s grammar.

Research on language change has been complicated and hindered by the problem of obtaining quality data. In many cases, the large volume of time required to collect recorded speech at different intervals, as necessary in lifespan studies, is prohibitive. Researchers further risk having participants drop out, leading to a limited pool of data. One way to avoid this is to use recordings available in the public domain that have been recorded for other purposes. The BBC broadcaster Sir David Attenborough is one of the few people who have had occasion to be recorded regularly over a great span of their lives. In this study, a selection of clips from wildlife documentaries that he has narrated furnishes the data for a glimpse into the possibilities of language change in adulthood. Received Pronunciation, the accent that Attenborough commands, is in the spotlight in this study. Two features of speech, namely, the presence and degree of t-glottalisation and the TRAP/STRUT vowel distinction, are examined in Attenborough’s speech against a background of known changes in the general usage of Received Pronunciation. The aim of the study is thus to see if language change occurs within the speech of an adult individual, particularly one whose speech is almost iconic. His narration from the 1960s is compared with narrations from the 1980s and 2000s in a dataset spanning nearly 60 years with the aim of discerning any trajectories of change. Some patterns in his formant values for several vowels across the three year groups are also discussed to provide an idea of what sort of changes can occur in the course of nearly 60 years. The study ultimately finds limited change in level of t-glottaling and only a slight movement of his TRAP/STRUT vowels towards each other between the narrations of the 1960s and the 1980s, with no perceptible change thereafter. The changes in community use of Received Pronunciation seem to affect him little. In terms of the overall vowel space, the trend seems to be towards a centering of most of the vowels, particularly the front vowels. Some plausible explanations for the limited amount of change are discussed in the article, which include Attenborough being seen as a steward of the accent as well as its utility to him in his position as a renowned broadcaster. The article also brings up the need for more research into the interface of gerontology and sociolinguistics, as the quite pronounced centering of the vowels may suggest natural age-related pronunciation effects.

The period from ages 18 to 25 is sometimes called 'emerging adulthood' (Arnett ,) since it has come to be characterized by major life transitions. Linguistically, this means that lifespan change in the individual (Sankoff ,) might be particularly likely during these years (Labov : 447; Bigham : 533; Kohn : 20). Addressing a need for more real‐time sociolinguistic research on early adulthood, we employ data from a panel study of a single speaker, 'Clara' (b. 1986), interviewed every 12 to 18 months between the ages of 16 and 30 (Tagliamonte , : 274–276). We examine four linguistic variables that differ according to level of the grammar and social salience in Clara's community (Toronto, Canada). For each variable, Clara's rates of the variants shift to match those of subsequent age cohorts in the community around her as she gets older and joins the workforce. These findings attest to emerging adulthood as a sociolinguistically formative period. More generally, they emphasize the inseparability of individuals and their linguistic surroundings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first issue of the second volume of Lifespans & Styles: Undergraduate Working Papers on Intraspeaker Variation. Thanks to the success of our first volume, as well as a new partnership with this volume’s Guest Editor, Dr Laurel MacKenzie (University of Manchester), Lifespans & Styles received four times as many publishable contributions this year as last year. We have split these into two issues and are happy to present the first seven papers here.

It is my pleasure to present the first issue of the third volume of Lifespans & Styles: Undergraduate Working Papers on Intraspeaker Variation . This issue includes five papers on topics about within-speaker variation that are largely under-researched in the field of variationist sociolinguistics.

This article investigates quotative use in American English in apparent and real time. The use of quotative be like, go and say in a corpus of conversation in American English dating 2004 / 2005 is compared with use in a similar corpus dating 1995 / 1996 (Barbieri 2007). Findings show that in present-day American English be like is the favorite choice for all speakers below age 40, and is extremely popular among young teenagers. The real time comparison reveals that speakers who in the mid-1990s were in their teens to mid-20s have not only maintained, but considerably increased use of be like over time; women aged 27–40 have also maintained use of be like over time.Such findings provide evidence of generational change, as well as of “lifespan change” (Sankoff 2005). Overall, the present findings indicate that be like is a true case of change in progress — a change still led by women; however they do not point to one particular type of change, suggesting that generational and communal change may operate simultaneously in the advancement of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on phonological variation largely supports the apparent-time construct, though some change across an individual's lifespan is possible. But how much change is possible in an individual's grammar? How much is grammar affected by extended absence in a new, urban speech community? Social dialect surveys traditionally exclude individuals who have left their community for an extended period of time, under the assumption that dialect contact causes levelling or restructuring of the linguistic system. However, our ongoing work in a Caribbean speech community suggests that the kinds of changes that can affect grammatical variables are more constrained than we might think. Raw frequencies of vernacular variants may fluctuate, but language-internal constraints persist. Drawing on recordings from Bequia we compare the group norms for absence of copula/auxiliarybe in three villages. We show that ‘urban sojourners’– Bequians who have spent an extended period overseas – may sound very different from their stay-at-home peers, but close examination shows only superficial restructuring of their grammars. Overall frequencies ofbe absence may be dramatically reduced but the ranking of language-internal constraints remains largely unchanged. These results reaffirm the validity of modelling variable rules in a community grammar, rather than as an aggregation of idiolectal norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]