We describe #FPGlobal, a digital platform for revitalizing Francoprovençal, a threatened and underdocumented language. This platform connects speakers and learners of Francoprovençal varieties in three European and two North American countries. Its community-developed, sociolinguistically informed, and electronically mediated approach fosters communication that is less likely to trigger essentialist language ideologies common to language endangerment contexts. Early uptake of the platform illustrates how it encourages language users to share multimodal responses to prompts, archives these responses, and develops corpora of speech and text with potential utility for both pedagogy and research. Our participatory framework increases cross-variety and intergenerational language use, introduces Francoprovençal into new domains, fosters a new generation of linguists, and offers data for investigating developing writing systems and variation patterns.

LIN 200 ‘Language in the United States’ is a large general-education course dealing with linguistic diversity in the United States. It is taught online in an asynchronous format and attracts hundreds of students each semester. The pedagogical innovations adopted in this course include the use of guest lectures by leading experts in the field, the design of discussion board activities to facilitate interaction among students and with instructors, and the organization of the material into adaptable learning modules. We adopt a learner-centered approach using the backward-design framework and applying the community-of-inquiry model. The result is a course that succeeds in achieving its main learning goals: to introduce students to the vast linguistic diversity in the United States and to the basic principles of linguistics, in particular, that human language is primarily spoken or signed (not written), that every human group has its own language, and that all languages are equally capable of expressing any human thought or emotion, although their social prestige may differ.

How and why speakers differ in the phonetic implementation of phonological contrasts, and the relationship of this ‘structured heterogeneity’ to language change, has been a key focus over fifty years of variationist sociolinguistics. In phonetics, interest has recently grown in uncovering ‘structured variability’—how speakers can differ greatly in phonetic realization in nonrandom ways—as part of the long-standing goal of understanding variability in speech. The English stop voicing contrast, which combines extensive phonetic variability with phonological stability, provides an ideal setting for an approach to understanding structured variation in the sounds of a community's language that illuminates both synchrony and diachrony. This article examines the voicing contrast in a vernacular dialect (Glasgow Scots) in spontaneous speech, focusing on individual speaker variability within and across cues, including over time. Speakers differ greatly in the use of each of three phonetic cues to the contrast, while reliably using each one to differentiate voiced and voiceless stops. Interspeaker variability is highly structured: speakers lie along a continuum of use of each cue, as well as correlated use of two cues—voice onset time and closure voicing—along a single axis. Diachronic change occurs along this axis, toward a more aspiration-based and less voicing-based phonetic realization of the contrast, suggesting an important connection between synchronic and diachronic speaker variation.

The conventional wisdom regarding the diachronic process whereby phonetic phenomena become phonologized appears to be the ‘error accumulation’ model, so called by Baker, Archangeli, and Mielke (2011). Under this model, biases in the phonetic context result in production or perception errors, which are misapprehended by listeners as target productions, and over time accumulate into new target productions. In this article, I explore the predictions of the hypocorrection model for one phonetic change (prevoiceless /ay/-raising) in detail. I argue that properties of the phonetic context underpredict and mischaracterize the contextual conditioning on this phonetic change. Rather, it appears that categorical, phonological conditioning is present from the very onset of this change.

The English pronoun they is currently undergoing a rapid change, in that they is increasingly being used to refer to specific (named) individuals as a singular personal pronoun. Although it has been used with a singular, indefinite antecedent for centuries, singular specific they is relatively new and coincides with rising recognition of the fluidity of gender identity and expression. For many individuals, they/them pronouns fit their gender identity best. However, such individuals are at a high risk of being misgendered because this new usage of they is neither well established grammatically nor part of prescribed use. In two experiments, adults from across the United States created short written narratives about individuals of different gender presentations. We varied whether participants saw a pronoun in the stimuli and, if so, whether they saw they, he, or she. We found that singular specific they was used less than she/he and that they-usage increased for those who reported being more familiar with it and with the LGBTQ+ community more generally. We further found that images that appeared androgynous or nonbinary were more likely to elicit singular specific they than were images that appeared binary. Finally, we varied whether participants received brief information about the person that included singular specific they. This type of modeling led to dramatic increases in they-production overall, and increases were most robust for participants who reported higher familiarity. Overall, this research illustrates that characteristics tied to social experience, modeling, and visual cues to an individual's gender identity are highly informative for the production of singular specific they. More broadly, we illustrate that language-processing costs related to language production can be boosted for users and therefore can intervene in the likelihood of misgendering.

In his target article, ‘Autism, constructionism, and nativism’, Kissine (2021) argues that data from autism should be taken into consideration in the debate about L1 acquisition. This paper responds to Kissine's piece by pointing out several of its underlying assumptions and suggesting directions for future research on the topic. Traditional framings of autism as a deficit have recently been challenged in favor of an identity-based approach, the neurodiversity paradigm, which suggests that autistic speech should not be measured in terms of its resemblance to nonautistic speech and that literature on intercultural miscommunication may offer insights into autistic communication. There are some indications that distinct autistic discourse practices may be identifiable in communities of practice, and studies on autistic literacy could benefit from considering the theoretical perspectives found in literature on multimodality and translanguaging. Finally, research on language acquisition might be strengthened by the incorporation of holistic neurocognitive theories about autistic minds.

Rachel Jeantel was the leading prosecution witness when George Zimmerman was tried for killing Trayvon Martin, but she spoke in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and her crucial testimony was dismissed as incomprehensible and not credible. The disregard for her speech in court and the media is familiar to vernacular speakers and puts Linguistics itself on trial: following Saussure, how do we dispel such ‘prejudices’ and ‘fictions’? We show that Jeantel speaks a highly systematic AAVE, with possible Caribbean influence. We also discuss voice quality and other factors that bedeviled her testimony, including dialect unfamiliarity and institutionalized racism. Finally, we suggest strategies for linguists to help vernacular speakers be better heard in courtrooms and beyond.

This article argues that language play is intimately related to linguistic variation and change. Using two corpora of online present-day English, we investigate playful conversion of adjectives into abstract nouns (e.g. made of awesome∅), uncovering consistent rule-governed patterning in the grammatical constraints in spite of this option stemming from deliberate subversion of standard overt suffixation. Building on Haspelmath's (1999) notion of ‘extravagance’ as one of the keys to language change, we account for the systematic patterning of deliberate linguistic subversion by appealing to tension between the need to stand out and the need to remain intelligible. While we do not claim that language play is the only cause of linguistic change, our findings position language play as a constant source of new linguistic variants in very large numbers, a small proportion of which endure as changes. Our conclusion is that language play goes a long way toward accounting for linguistic innovations—with respect to where they come from and why languages change at all.

The study of sound change in progress in Philadelphia has been facilitated by the application of forced alignment and automatic vowel measurement to a large corpus of neighborhood studies, including 379 speakers with dates of birth from 1888 to 1991. Two of the sound changes active in the 1970s show a linear pattern of incrementation in succeeding decades. The fronting of back upgliding vowels/aw/and/ow/shows a reversal in the direction of change, beginning with those born after 1940. The study also finds a general withdrawal from two salient features of local phonology, tense/æh/and/oh/, led by those with higher education. Younger speakers with higher education have also reorganized the traditional Philadelphia tense/lax split of short-a to form a nasal system with tensing before all and only nasal consonants. The development of the Philadelphia vowel system can be understood in the geographic context of neighboring dialects. Features in common with North and North Midland dialects have accelerated in use while features in common with South Midland and Southern dialects have been reversed in favor of Northern patterns. The microevolution of a linguistic system can be seen here as subject to phonological generalizations but driven by social evaluation as features rise in level of salience for members of the speech community.

This article argues that an enhanced understanding of the dynamics of language change can be gained by uniting two perspectives whose intimate relationship has not previously been subject to linguists' attention: language change as a historical process, and language change as experienced by individual speakers. It makes the case that during language change in progress, there are three possible trajectory types that can be manifested across speakers' lifespans. I review one example of each, as analyzed in a longitudinal corpus of Québécois French. First, people may acquire patterns of variation reflecting the stage of the change at the time of childhood language acquisition and retain that pattern thereafter. Second, older speakers, continuing to receive input from the younger generations that form an increasingly large proportion of their speech community, may also change in that direction. Third, aging speakers may become more conservative, showing retrograde lifespan change in the face of community change in the opposite direction. In conclusion, I examine the likely etiology of each trajectory type and evaluate its consequences for language change.

Eckert (2008) rightly points out that context, variation, and indexicality are inextricably bound. This work—an in-depth case study of the social significance of the English definite article—presents a picture whereby semantic meaning is part of that same web of interrelations. The primary empirical claim of this work is that using the with a plural NP (e.g. the Americans) to talk about all or typical members of a group of individuals tends to depict that group as a monolith separate from the speaker, and to an extent that using a bare plural (e.g. Americans) does not. I present two variationist, corpus-based studies that provide clear evidence of this effect. I then provide a principled account of the effect, building on the insights of sociolinguistic and pragmatic research and extending their collective reach. As I show, the effect is largely rooted in crucial differences between the semantic meaning of the-plurals and that of related alternative expressions. As with a broad range of associated phenomena, the exact interpretation of a particular the-plural on a given occasion of use depends importantly upon its indexical character, the beliefs of the speech participants, and myriad other contextual factors, but is nonetheless constrained in a principled way.

Grammaticalization research has led to important insights into the driving processes of innovation and propagation. Yet what has generally been lacking is a principled way of analyzing their interaction. Research into innovation focuses on the role of individual language users and tends to take a more qualitative approach, while propagation is typically studied in terms of the community grammar and tends to be more statistically driven. We propose an approach that bridges the two. Drawing on a much larger historical data set than is commonly done, our study shows how a highresolution analysis of semantic and morphosyntactic behavior can be married to statistics, resulting in a method that measures the degree of grammaticalization at the level of single attestations. We apply this method to the early grammaticalization of be going to INF, showing how a communal increase breaks down into different rates of change in the run-up to, the middle of, and right after conventionalization. Additionally, we trace lifespan change of individual authors longitudinally. While not robustly in evidence, there are hints of postadolescence reanalysis in the run-up generation, and of increased realization of innovative features in the middle generation.

Previous researchers who applied cognitive dissonance theory to charitable giving found that giving is for many donors a means of acting consistently with their self-concepts as rational and moral beings. The present study extends this inquiry by investigating how “rationality” and “morality” are culturally constructed norms. Donor communications are effective insofar as their use of language reproduces the expectations of the stakeholder community’s shared culture. This finding is indicated by the author’s extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a Baptist denomination in the United States. The capacity of professional leaders to arouse, preempt, or reduce members’ cognitive dissonances over giving derived from language use that activated (as it simultaneously reified) concepts and associations approved by their Baptist subculture. Building on this and previous studies, the present author proposes a process model for pre- and post-decision cognitive dissonance over charitable giving.

This study investigates how listeners associate acoustically different vowels with a single linguistic vowel quality. Listeners were asked to identify vowel sounds as /æ/ or /ʌ/ and to indicate the size of the speaker that produced them. Results indicate that perceived vowel quality trades off with the perception of speaker size: different vowels can sound the same, and the same vowel can sound different when a different speaker is perceived. These findings suggest that vowel normalization is broadly similar to perceptual constancy in other domains, and that social, indexical, and linguistic information play an important role in determining even the most fundamental units of linguistic representation.

To mitigate systemic culturally and linguistically rooted barriers to STEM achievement, particularly for African-American students, implementing linguistically and culturally sustaining approaches to STEM education is critically relevant. This article presents an engagement model for using sociolinguistics to enhance K–12 STEM education, drawing upon research carried out with K–12 STEM educators who attended workshops on language variation and subsequently participated in semi-structured interviews and a focus group. Findings indicate the centrality of integrating linguistics into K–12 STEM teacher preparation, in order to advance educational equity for all culturally and linguistically diverse students.

Authenticity has been a central concept in sociolinguistics and in the study of literary representations of dialect. This article examines the ideology of dialect authenticity in the context of literary fiction from the point of view of language users. Two Finnish reading groups comprising members with different dialect backgrounds read one Finnish novel, in which the Far Northern dialects of Finnish are represented in a partly unconventional manner. Thematic analysis was applied to two video-recorded reading group discussions to investigate how the groups discuss the novel’s dialect representation and its (in)authenticity. The analysis revealed that instead of adhering to a static and essentialist ideal of authenticity, the readers overlooked the unconventional representation of literary dialect and viewed authenticity as a dynamic process. The study contributes to theoretical discussions on dialect authenticity and employs an experimental approach to exploring language ideologies through reading groups.