Within-region geographical variation in Canadian Englishes has rarely been investigated on a large scale. This is at least in part due to claims of Canadian “Englishes” being largely geographically homogeneous (Chambers, 2004; Boberg, 2010; Denis, 2020), despite evidence of regional variation (Dollinger, 2019). Here, we build on older literature that documented regional variation in English spoken in British Columbia (BC). We focus on two regions in BC—the Okanagan and the Lower Mainland—examining four phonological patterns: pre-velar raising of kit, dress, and trap, and Canadian Raising of price. Using Generalized Additive Mixed Models, we find regional differences in vowel pronunciation patterns for pre-velar raising of the examined front vowels and for Canadian Raising of price. Both regions engage in Canadian Raising and pre-velar raising. From that lens, the regions are homogeneous. However, the patterns are produced in regionally specific ways, providing further evidence that regional variation exists within smaller geographical areas in Canadian English. Overall, this challenges the claims of homogeneity for English spoken in Canada and more generally invites an interrogation of what homogeneity means.

An avenue for the progress of areal linguistics in South America is the investigation of the geographical distribution of specific features, such as the expression of sociative causation. Sociative causation is a particular type of causation where the causer not only makes the causee do an action but also participates in it (Shibatani & Pardeshi, 2002). Guillaume & Rose (2010) hypothesize that dedicated sociative causative markers are an areal feature of South America, in particular western South America. The aim of the present paper is to reassess the spatial distribution of these markers based on a large worldwide sample of 325 languages. The results show that dedicated sociative causative markers are significantly more frequent in South America compared to the rest of the world.

One of the peculiarities of Falkland Islands toponymy is its multilingual character: French, English, and Spanish names coexist throughout the archipelago serving as a reminder of its busy history. American Spanish gaucho place names were coined after the British settlement in 1833. These toponyms mostly identify inland locations, reflecting the new practical need for orientation, delimitation, and land management for the livestock business of the new colony. However, such place names have not yet received exclusive attention. Until now they have been only mentioned in gazetteers with reference to their Spanish origin. The present work resorts to both traditional toponymic approaches and fieldwork to identify toponyms, understand how they work, and analyze how Islanders perceive them. This is done under the assumption that studying Islanders’ attitudes contributes to revealing historical facts as well as relationships between the Islands and the mainland.

In this article, we aim to reconcile the interrelated role of social and spatial influences on colloquial German by conducting an apparent-time analysis of 15 lexical, morphological, and phonetic variables from the Atlas of Colloquial German (AdA). Specifically, we introduce a “change in variation intensity” (CVI) measure meant to gauge the degree of change in colloquial speech between younger and older cohorts. Using this measure, we investigate (a) whether the CVI within and across variables is prone to spatial patterns and (b) the extent to which the CVI differs systematically between variable types. Results from visual–spatial analyses indicate clear spatial patterns, though the geographical distributions are largely item-specific, and a linear mixed-effects model revealed no effect of variable type. More broadly, the CVI measure represents an important advancement in how we address language variation and change from a methodological-statistical perspective, specifically when dealing with heterogeneous, crowdsourced data.

We present and evaluate the map-based accent-recognition task, in which listeners place speech fragments of regionally accented Netherlandic Standard Dutch on a map in a browser-based experiment. On the basis of 15,780 accent placements (from 1,578 participants), we demonstrate that this task successfully elicits listener associations between speech and space, which are mediated by listeners’ sociolinguistic representations. We subsequently assess the task’s validity by comparing the listeners’ map-based associations with objective dialectological distances: results show a significant correlation between production and perception and hence establish convergent validity. Finally, we use a hierarchical cluster analysis to map out listeners’ perceptual isoglosses. These reveal that the accent placements largely clustered along the province boundaries, but with dialectologically motivated deviations and subcategorizations. We discuss methodological implications for perceptual dialectology and sociolinguistic implications for Dutch.