Selected Papers from NWAV 52
Volume
31
Number
2
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Date Published
2025
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 21
Publication Shmooze and Chutzpah: A Lexical Analysis of Sociolinguistic Variation in Australia and the United States(Department of Linguistics, 2025-11-14) Breslow, EmmaThis study analyzes sociolinguistic variation through Australians’ and Americans’ self-reported familiarity with English lexical items derived from Jewish languages like Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Analysis is based on an online survey of 611 participants, adapted from a similar survey of Jewish American English conducted by Benor (2011). This study explores knowledge of the terms “shmooze” and “chutzpah” amongst Jewish and non-Jewish populations in Australia and the United States. Both “shmooze” and “chutzpah” have multiple meanings in English, familiarity with which might be expected to differ according to Jewish and national identity. Results suggest that while Jewish and non-Jewish participants in both countries share familiarity with some senses of these terms, other senses are more familiar to specific communities like Jewish Australians. In analyzing how ethnoreligious and national identity correlate with different meanings of these terms, I argue more broadly for the efficacy of variationist sociolinguistic study of lexical items, especially in cases of dispersed or diasporic language communities.Publication A Multifaceted Approach to Variation and Change of /ɰ/ ‘Gamma’ in Tlingit(Department of Linguistics, 2025-11-14) Crippen, James; Cardoso, Amanda; Brown, Simone; Lahlou, OmarInteractions between groups and individuals result in the diffusion of linguistic variation and therefore less linguistic differentiation between populations, just as isolation of populations leads to more linguistic differentiation. But our understanding of what interaction and isolation mean is limited by the social and linguistic group and the types of evidence that are considered when establishing theories on language variation and change. In this study we use evidence from history, oral tradition, ethnography, and acoustic analysis of archival language recordings to understand the diffusion of a sound change in the Tlingit language. We focus on the voiced velar approximant /ɰ/, termed ‘gamma’ in Tlingit language research. This sound provides an excellent testing ground as it is known to be variety-specific and its distribution over time and area provides information about how, when and with whom it changed. ‘Gamma’ is acoustically analyzed with manual measurements using multiple acoustic measures (F1, F2, intensity, and harmonic-to-noise ratio) from archival data for one speaker whose variety had retained ‘gamma’ and who produces it in their recordings and one speaker whose dialect had already lost gamma. This acoustic analysis provides phonetic evidence relating to its eventual loss in all varieties and helps us to better understand the acoustic properties of the voiced velar approximant given that it is understudied and cross-linguistic rare. We find that gamma is most approximant-like in all the acoustic properties, but it is also variable and heavily influenced by the surrounding segments. This contributes to the potential for it to change in an attempt to better maintain phonological contrasts. Gamma’s geographical diffusion seems to be well explained through geographical proximity, but we find other evidence supports an irregular diffusion of gamma loss through geographical space and that geographic isolation is only partially relevant for those areas where gamma is retained the longest. Geographically closer regions are likely to have more linguistically similar inventories and ‘gamma’ is constrained to particular peripheral areas, as predicted by an geographically radial outward diffusion of the loss of gamma. Evidence points to one area as the origin of the change and then its spread by movement within and across Tlingit communities following the Juneau and Klondike gold rushes. Therefore, despite contemporary appearances, it is likely that gamma loss diffused irregularly through population movements. Why then is gamma retained at only the three peripheral areas? We find that geographic isolation may explain two of the areas where gamma is retained the longest, but this does not seem to be the only explanation. We suggest that cultural conservatism and complex social identities from intensive contact with other societies and languages is also relevant for the retention of gamma. In one area geographic isolation offers no explanation and instead language contact may justify retention via similar phoneme inventories. Through multiple types of evidence, we are able to provide a more nuanced picture of the distribution of gamma and the diffusion of linguistic change across Tlingit varieties. This study provides a springboard for other work that integrates evidence from multiple fields in order to better understand language variation and change.Publication Both (of) the Variants Show a Couple (of) Different Patterns: Social Conditioning of “of”-Variation across Multiple Linguistic Environments(Department of Linguistics, 2025-11-14) Cutler, Molly; Mitra, Auromita; Barnard, Marc; Gobel, Jessica; MacKenzie, LaurelA longstanding question in sociolinguistics is whether the social patterning of a variant is consistent across linguistic environments. It is traditionally assumed that language-external (i.e. social) factors do not interact with language-internal factors (characteristics of the linguistic environment surrounding the varying item) in the conditioning of variation (Labov 1993, Labov 2001:28, Labov 2010:265), but this has largely gone untested with modern statistical methods and large data sets. In this paper, we report on a study of a single variable alternation in English — between ‘of’ and Ø, henceforth “‘of’-variation” — that is instantiated in several distinct linguistic environments. We find that its social patterning differs by environment, suggesting a counterexample to the proposed independence of external and internal conditioning factors.Publication Emerging Rhoticity in Nauruan English(Department of Linguistics, 2025-11-14) Britain, David; Jemini, Shaip; Mettler, LauraIn this paper we investigate incipient rhoticity—the realisation of postvocalic /r/—in the English of Nauru, an equatorial Micronesian island of the Western Pacific. Despite its small size, Nauru has a complex colonial history: Germany, Japan, the UK, Australia and New Zealand were all implicated in exploiting Nauru’s phosphate reserves in the 80 years before independence in 1968. Its Anglophone rulers were all nations whose citizens were overwhelmingly non-rhotic, and whose teaching models were non-rhotic too. Older Nauruans, born during the economic boom enabled by phosphate mining, are indeed largely non-rhotic, but rhoticity is now becoming increasingly common among the young on the island. Our article begins with a variationist analysis of Nauruan English rhoticity, based on a subsample of 16 recordings from a 34-hour corpus of informal conversations with islanders. We extracted 250 tokens of postvocalic /r/ from the recordings of each speaker for a total of 4000 tokens. These were then coded for age and gender, as well as for a range of internal linguistic constraints, such as, following Nagy and Irwin (2010), the morphological and phonological position of /r/ in the lexeme, the preceding vowel, word stress and word frequency. Results show a statistically significant increase in the use of rhoticity across apparent time, led by younger female Nauruans. The morphological and phonological position of /r/ in the lexeme, the preceding vowel and word stress also significantly shaped the likelihood of rhoticity. But why is Nauru, previously non-rhotic, with strong connections to Australia, also overwhelmingly non-rhotic, now acquiring post-vocalic /r/? In an attempt to account for this, we consider the roles of migration to Nauru, transnational contact with the Nauruan diaspora, contact with incipiently rhotic Pasifika communities in Australia and New Zealand, substrate influence from Nauruan, and the influence of international social media.Publication Placing the ‘‘Needs Washed’’ Construction in a Broader Settler Colonial Context(Department of Linguistics, 2025-11-14) Duncan, DanielThe ‘‘needs washed’’ construction (e.g., ‘‘The car needs washed’’) is well attested as a minority morphosyntactic feature in British and American English varieties. It is believed to have arrived in the US due to Scots-Irish migration from the UK during the colonial period. However, the feature is largely unattested in other settler colonial varieties, despite Scots-Irish and Scottish people participating in early settlement. This poses a problem for the account of the feature in the US: why is it in the US, but not, say, Canada? This paper uses a grammatical acceptability survey to posit a resolution to the problem. I show that the "needs washed" construction is accepted by a sizable minority of Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders, that acceptance corresponds with historical settlement patterns in Canada and New Zealand, and that constraints on acceptability in these three states mirror those in the US and UK. This suggests that the construction is present in all settler colonial varieties, supporting its proposed origin in the US. The findings suggest a pan-colonial scale of homogeneity in settler colonial varieties in which they share a set of minority features as a result of sharing similar groups of founding settlers.Publication Telling a (Racio)gender: Morphosyntactic Variation and Identity Attribution in Trans English/Spanish Speakers’ Recitation of the Pear Film(Department of Linguistics, 2025-11-14) Mendoza, Dozandri C.; Zimman, Lal; Bedin, Cooper; Macias, Nicky; Ali, Kris; Brown, CedarAs part of a project on the interrelationship between gender and race attribution in the experiences of trans people of color, we used the Pear Film method to elicit spontaneous, unscripted discourse on a controlled topic. In this method, participants are asked to watch the Pear Film, a six-minute film with no dialogue, and to summarize what they saw. Though we intended it to be a relatively ‘‘neutral’’ stimulus, we soon found that our participants read the film through raciogendered semiotic ideologies that offer unexpected insights on their own gender and race attribution processes. Though many of our interviewees were critical of making assumptions about others’ genders, they sometimes used normative gendered language for the characters in the film. Rather than seeing this as a failure to uphold trans-affirming language norms, however, we show how trans interviewees took (self-)critical stances regarding gendered assumptions and how their attributions were explained through nuanced orientations to the qualities of the film and its characters. We identify the Pear Film as a useful sociolinguistic tool that sheds light on participants’ sociopolitical worldviews and their places within it.Publication Elusive Pharyngeals: Exploring Social Variation in the Production of Pharyngealized /sˁ/ in Ammani Jordanian Arabic(Department of Linguistics, 2025-11-14) Salman, Amenah; Dalola, AmandaThis study examines how Tajweed, the study of phonetic and phonological rules governing Quranic sounds, influences the realization of the pharyngealized voiceless alveolar fricative /sˤ/ in Ammani Jordanian Arabic (AJA). Given the popularity of Tajweed courses in Jordan and the heightened phonological awareness they foster, we predict that they may play a role in shaping sound variation. We focus on /sˤ/ because it is the most frequent pharyngealized consonant in both the Quran and Arabic at large (Madi 2010). Despite its prevalence, it exhibits considerable variation (Abudalbuh 2010, Alzoubi 2017), with some speakers employing the expected pharyngealized variant while others produce a weakened articulation. This variation parallels the lenition observed in AJA affricates (Salman and Dalola 2023). Our analysis is based on 240 tokens collected from 12 hours of Zoom-based sociolinguistic interviews with 24 upper-class, indigenous West Ammani speakers, coding each token as lenited or non-lenited. A mixed-effects logistic regression revealed a strong main effect of Tajweed proficiency (p<0.001), indicating that advanced Tajweed training significantly constrains lenition. Neither gender (p=0.735) nor age (p=0.154) reached significance, although women and younger participants displayed a slight tendency toward greater lenition. The implication of this research is that studies of sociophonetic variation, including those in AJA, must incorporate local social categories to fully understand the sociolinguistic dynamics at play in the language.Publication I’m Knowing: AAE and the Verb ‘‘Know’’ in the Progressive(Department of Linguistics, 2025-11-14) Kortenhoven, GideonIn this paper, I address an under-examined use of the stative verb “know” (e.g., “I’m knowing”) in African American English (AAE). In AAE grammar, “know”, a stative verb, has been reported to only be possible in the progressive form when following preverbal tense-aspect-mood (TAM) markers such as BIN, invariant be and steady. Green (1998, 2000) regards progressive “know” without a TAM marker as ungrammatical (e.g. *“She knowing how to drive”). Scott (2016), however, provides an example of “know” in the progressive with no TAM marker (e.g. “I'm knowing more about it each day”), which appears to contradict Green’s argument. As a native AAE English speaker, and a productive user of “I’m knowing”, I hypothesize that this construction may grammatical for younger AAE speakers, representing a change-in-progress. To test this hypothesis, I examine the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) and data from Twitter. I assess contemporary usage of “know” in the progressive form with and without TAM markers in terms of age distribution. The rate of usage of the innovation “I’m knowing” is compared to long established constructions in AAE, “I be knowing” and “I been/BIN knowing”. The results indicate that TAM-less “knowing” may be in the early stages of a change-in-progress in AAE across regions, with young people being the leaders in this change.Publication Language Change in Filipino Sign Language Cardinal Numerals(Department of Linguistics, 2025-11-14) Notarte Balanquit, LibertyFilipino Sign Language (FSL), the community sign language across the Philippine islands, clearly demonstrates borrowing from American Sign Language (ASL) due to their history of contact dating back to early 1900s. A linguistic domain in which direct borrowing from ASL is evident is the cardinal numeral system. Over time, borrowed forms have undergone phonological changes that led to change in the morphological strategy of the numeral sign – from sequential to simultaneous. Specifically, for the numeral concepts of one hundred and one thousand and their multiples, as well as the additive series 16 to 19, FSL shows evidence of assimilation, leading to the reduction of lexical signs to mere movement patterns bound to an atom. To analyze the extent to which the ongoing change is predicted by social factors, a binomial logistic regression model was fitted to determine the effects of ASL exposure (in years), age, region, and gender on the odds of using simultaneous (reduced) forms. The model revealed that higher odds of using simultaneous forms are associated with Mindanao (odds ratio (OR)=2.97, p=0.0496) and the Visayas (OR=21.54, p=0.0002) in contrast to Luzon. Additionally, signers from the Visayas have the highest odds of using simultaneous forms (OR=7.24, p=0.0044) when compared to Mindanao and Luzon. As for the predictors of gender, ASL exposure, and age, we cannot conclude based on the current model whether the odds of using simultaneous forms (compared to sequential forms) are indeed lower in females than in males (OR=0.39, p=0.0560), among signers with longer ASL exposure (OR=0.93, p=0.1531), or among older signers (OR=0.98, p=0.4940). What is clear, in light of the present analysis, is the fact that an alternative direction of language change is also occurring, reflecting a general tendency of signers in the regions to reduce the signs for easier and faster articulation.Publication Post-colonial Englishes in Asian Societies: Homogeneity and Variable /z/ Production in English Spoken in the Philippines(Department of Linguistics, 2025-11-14) Samejon, KevinAlthough linguistic variability in post-colonial Englishes is widely acknowledged, the breadth of factors that condition this variation remains underexplored. This study investigates variable word-final /z/ production in English spoken in the Philippines, a purported feature also observed in other Asian varieties of Englishvarieties. While prevailing frameworks, such as Schneider’s (2003) Dynamic Model, suggest that English spoken in the Philippines is ‘homogeneous’, some scholars have critiqued the Tagalog- and Metro Manila-centric orientation of many descriptions that support this claim, arguing that such perspectives risk overlooking regional differences. In response, the present study adopts a variationist sociolinguistic approach to examine /z/-voicing among bilingual speakers from Metro Manila and Metro Cebu, where the dominant local languages, Tagalog and Cebuano respectively, both lack the /z/ phoneme. Results reveal that both linguistic (i.e., following segment) and social (i.e., ethnolinguistic background) factors significantly condition /z/-voicing, providing evidence against the notion of a singular, homogenized “Philippine English” variety. The significance of this finding becomes even more apparent when contrasted with /s/-voicing patterns in the speakers’ English and non-English language production. Altogether, these findings underscore the need to move beyond Metro Manila-centric and education-focused analyses of English variation in the Philippines, and instead account for how ethnolinguistic identity and the local dynamics of the groups’ post-colonial contexts shape patterns of phonetic variation.
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