Urdu language is a member of Indo-European family tree and within the zone of Indo-Iranian branch, whereas Turkish language is a member of Altaic family tree. Both of these languages belong to different family trees, but these languages have many words in common. Urdu language has 41 consonant sounds and 11 vowel sounds, whereas Turkish language…

The present dissertation discusses the importance of rootedness, defined as orientation towards place, and how it factors into sociolinguistic studies. Although rootedness is not a new concept in sociolinguistics, it has been infrequently operationalized to understand its role in language change. Linguists have discussed concepts similar to…

This study concerns the development of the determiners MINE/MY and THINE/THY in the Early Modern English period. The -N forms had essentially been ousted before words starting with consonants over the Middle English period, and over the subsequent centuries, these forms also fell into disuse before words starting with initial vowels and…

Spoken word recognition depends on variations in fine-grained phonetics as listeners decode speech. However, many models of second language (L2) speech perception focus on units such as isolated syllables, and not on words. In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated how fine-grained phonetic details (i.e. duration of nasalization on…

Spoken words vary phonetically along a number of dimensions, such as duration, pitch, and vowel quality. Much of this variation is associated with social factors like the dialect, age, or gender of the speaker -- a type of variation termed 'socio-indexical'. Traditional theories of speech perception have seen this socio-indexical variation as a…

This dissertation investigated how a bilingual's experiences can affect how their first language pronunciation can differ from monolingual speakers of their two languages. We used a methodology incorporating quantitative phonetic measurements of voice onset time and vowel formants, grammar and vocabulary tests, and qualitative measures of language…

ELT materials tend to use prestige variety speakers as models, an underlying assumption being that this is needed in order to acquire the phonology necessary to parse English speech (Rose & Galloway, 2019). Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) (Galloway & Rose, 2018) provides the potential for movement away from such 'native speaker'…

South Africa is a country characterised by great linguistic diversity. Large indigenous languages, such as isiZulu and isiXhosa, are spoken by many millions of people, as well as the languages with European roots, such as Afrikaans and English, which are spoken by several millions and used by many more in daily life. This situation provides a…

The data from this study investigate phrase-final vowel devoicing in Metropolitan French among L1 and L2 speakers, in terms of number of times a speaker devoices a phrase-final high vowel and percentage of the vowel that is devoiced. The goal is to assess whether experienced L2 speakers use style-based variation in response to the same factors as…

This dissertation presents the results of a tripartite exploration of English use by Latinxs in post-Katrina New Orleans, defined here as an ethnolinguistic repertoire that I call New Orleans Latinx English (NOLAE). The project considers how contemporary English use differs from that found in a pre-Katrina sample, how social network geometry…

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus--the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds--develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children's speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable…

It has been recently argued that the particles in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) constitute a grammatical category that actively draws new members to it. Drawing on distributional and collocational evidence, this paper establishes that CSE has a new particle, "ya". The paper then proceeds to analyse the discourse pragmatic function…

The present article provides an exploration of ultimate attainment in second language (L2) and its limitations. It is argued that the question of maturational constraints can best be investigated when the reference population is bilingual and exposed on a regular basis to varieties of their first language (L1) that show cross-linguistic influence.…

This collection of papers provides a broad overview of the foundations of, and current research on, language variation in the southern United States, exploring historical and cultural elements, iconic contemporary features, and current changes in progress. The 12 papers are: (1) "The Origins of Southern American English" (John Algeo);…

A social dialect survey of a New Zealand community documented a change in progress in the pronunciation of the vowels in words such as "air" and "ear." The data support a tentative interpretation that a shift to the variant with the closer onset for AIR words was initiated by middle-aged Pakeha women. (38 references) (Author/LB)