This study tracks the use of familiarizer vocatives across the twentieth century in Ontario, Canada from a corpus comprising 11 million words of conversational interviews from individuals in eighteen communities, born between the 1880s and the 2000s. Vocatives are a richly variable grammatical category which are strongly tied to their sociolinguistic context. We focus here on the sub-category of familiarizers for birth years 1950-2004, which in these materials are almost entirely dominated by , , and . We extracted and coded several thousand vocative tokens, yielding 467 familiarizers. Random Forest modeling shows significant effects of birth year, gender, and community; but not education nor occupation. The dominant familiarizer declines with the rise of (outside Toronto) and (especially inside Toronto). Women use these incoming forms more than men do, perhaps as alternatives to the masculine-associated form . The results show rapid change for familiarizers in patterns which parallel longstanding sociolinguistic principles.

This study investigates the social evaluation of linguistic variation and the cognitive monitoring processes involved. Recognizing the need for cross-regional research that keeps experimental factors constant, we focus on (ing) and (t)-deletion. We investigate frequency evaluation as managed in England, UK ( = 200), and in Pennsylvania, US ( = 150). Results for (ing) indicate no significant effect of [ɪn]-frequency in England, while in Pennsylvania the frequency of [ɪn] significantly affects ratings regarding perceived professionalism. We also found evidence for listeners' awareness of the attitude target ( = 15) to affect their ratings regarding perceived professionalism. Variation in (t)-deletion did not prompt any significant differences.

This study examines production of the vowels /æ/, /ɛ/, and /e/ among three different English-speaking ethnic populations in Manitoba, Canada, focusing on patterns of raising and vowel overlap in prevelar contexts. Although raising of /æ/ before /ɡ/ has been documented for the Prairies region of Canada generally, its specific occurrence in Manitoba as well as the occurrence of vowel merger(s) there has not previously been examined in detail. This study finds that pre-velar patterns are distinguished by coda voicing, with voiceless /k/ producing lowering and some retraction while voiced /ɡ/ and /ŋ/ produce similar raising and especially fronting patterns in preceding /æ/ and /ɛ/. Statistical analysis of spatial and temporal qualities shows that, while complete merger is not observed between any of the three vowels, there is much more substantial overlap in their productions before the voiced velars than in other contexts; in contrast, the voiceless velar /k/ is associated with productions which often substantially diverge from these. The results suggest that Manitoba speakers' productions of these vowels share some features of other dialects with velar-affected productions, but the arrangement of these features in Manitoba may represent a unique configuration having a potential, incipient, or early-stage prevelar merger of /æ/ and /ɛ/, mainly without the participation of /e/. Social factors such as conservatism and extra-local affiliation are also found to play a role in production.

This research explores perceptions of linguistic variation in English in Washington state (WA). Respondents marked on a map of WA the places where they believe people's English sounds "different" and provided a label for that type of English. The analysis of the results used digital tools to create composite maps consisting of (1) respondents' spatial perceptions of English in WA, (2) spatial perceptions of English in WA according to different demographic groups, and (3) affective values associated with regions identified by respondents. The results suggest that Washingtonians perceive that urban areas and eastern WA are places where English is different. The results also demonstrate that when respondents are surveyed about variation within their own state rather than variation across the country, local types of organizational categories, such as an urban/rural dichotomy or belief in a regional standard, can emerge.