Focuses on the most important problem translators are faced with when translating Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" into German: how can the speech of The African-American Jim be rendered? Examines both orthographic and other linguistic strategies that have been used to differentiate Jim's voice over the last hundred years. (Author/VWL)

Reports an apparent time survey of the Fenland dialect of Eastern England that provides an example of a range of dialect contact processes reconfiguring variable patterns of past tense "be." (Author/VWL)

Explores the distribution of /ai/ monophthongization in African-American and European-American speakers in Memphis, Tennessee. Presents evidence of extensive glide weakening in the African-American community in Memphis and compares it to the degree and contexts of glide weakening in the European-American community. (Author/VWL)

Presents results of a longitudinal study of Murcian Spanish carried out following a real-time approach with a retrospective trend design in order to detect and measure the apparent increasing diffusion of standard Castilian features from Northern peninsular Spanish. (Author/VWL)

Presents evidence that Detroit African Americans are participating in a recent sound change that is typically associated with some White but not African American varieties in the American South. Reports a leveling pattern in which /ai/ monothongization has expanded to the salient pre-voiceless context in Detroit African American English (AAE).…

Presents a survey of the French indefinite "tu/vous" in in earlier periods and in a range of varieties. Draws on a corpus of French spoken in Picardy in Northern France to investigate the extent to which this use of second person pronouns helps to avoid ambiguity and co-occurs with another grammatical variable. (Author/VWL)

Investigated two historically isolated communities in the United States--Smith Island, Maryland and the Lumbee Native American community in Robeson County, North Carolina. Demonstrates that contrary to assumption, isolated communities may be linguistically innovative and heterogeneous. Explanations for this are found to be both cognitive and…

Presents a study showing that New Zealanders have very different attitudes to variants that sociolinguists have lumped together in the past suggests that globalization with localization is an important principle for variationists to take into account. (Author/VWL)

Examines linguistic variation on an Internet Relay Chat channel with respect to the hypothesis, based on the model of Milroy and Milroy (1992) that standard variants tend to be associated with weak social network ties, while vernacular variants are associated with strong network ties. (Author/VWL)

Examines an area of sociolinguistic methodology that thus far has received relatively little theoretical attention: the composition and analysis of orthographic transcriptions of non-standard speech. Addresses the following aspects: linguistic/semiotic properties of orthographic transcription, and the different functions of orthographic writing…

By combining features of matched guise tests with sociolinguistic interviewing and oral performance, this study investigates the social meanings carried by non-standard orthographies. Participant evaluations of the personas showed that people connected orthography to social identities. Specifically, results found people uncritically and…

Collected naturalistic data from six children age 8-9 talking with their relatives and friends. Focuses on directives and requests used by the children and their interlocutors in informal conversations. (Author/VWL)

Based on the results of three variationist studies on personal pronouns used in Montreal French, shows how real-time data can shed light on apparent time interpretation and increase understanding of morphosyntactic changes. Longitudinal data for a 24-year period from three corpora of spoken French are used to discuss cases of variation.…

Based on an investigation of spellings of German punk fanzines, this article sketches a framework for the analysis of nonstandard spellings in media texts. The analysis distinguishes between a number of spelling types, which include both representations of spoken language and purely graphemic modifications, and three patterns of spelling usage:…

Part of a large-scale study on variation in American Sign Language, this article examines variation in the form of the sign DEAF, which can be produced by moving the forefinger from ear to chin, from chin to ear, or by contacting the lower cheek. Multivariate analysis of more than 1600 tokens of DEAF extracted from sociolinguistic interviews shows…