Amanda Cardoso

The present paper advocates for incorporating Big Team Science practices into the language sciences. Big Team Science is a promising mode of collaborative research in which top-down coordination directs efforts by a large number of researchers from different institutions towards a common scientific goal. The redistribution of resources and division of labor enabled by Big Team Science may enable researchers to increase methodological rigor, systematically explore claims across a wider sample of languages, and to diversify both the languages studied and the researchers engaged. However, implementing Big Team Science practices is not without challenges, some of which are unique to the language sciences. We suggest strategies and best practices for adapting to these challenges, including theoretical and methodological pluralism, variation in conditions among data collection sites, and navigating a trade-off between maximizing methodological rigor and ability to engage with the most inclusive, typologically broad language samples.

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.

The acoustic properties of the voiced velar approximant [ɰ] are poorly characterized, partly from understudy of relevant languages and partly from uncertainty about the sound itself. We investigate this sound in Tlingit, a critically endangered indigenous language of northwestern North America, where [ɰ] contrasts with labialized [w] and palatal [j] in some dialects but not in others where it was lost through sound change (reductive primary split with merge). We use audio recordings of spoken narratives spanning much of the 20th century from speakers with and without [ɰ] to characterize this sound both dialectally and diachronically. We measure formants (f1–f3) to identify place information, amplitude for oral aperture, and harmonic-to-noise ratio for manner. Existing descriptions and phonological patterns predict that [ɰ] is an approximant and not a fricative so we compare against known approximants for differences in turbulence and spectral properties. We also compare against labialized sounds including contrastive [w] for absence of lowered f3 to exclude lip rounding in [ɰ]. We argue that it is the intersection of these acoustic cues that distinguishes [ɰ] from similar sounds, but that these cues are unstable so that dialectal sound change arises from misperception in perturbations of their production.

This paper shows that the Liverpool English dorsal fricative, derived through the lenition of /k/, is subject to place of articulation assimilation, driven by the preceding vowel. This is similar to the vowel-driven aspects of typical perseverative Dorsal Fricative Assimilation (a type of palatalisation), as found, for example, in the German ich-Laut~ach-Laut alternation, where (among other things) a preceding front high or mid vowel is followed by the front dorsal [ç], and other vowels are followed by a back dorsal. However, the majority Liverpool English pattern differs from previously described cases of Dorsal Fricative Assimilation in that [ç] only occurs following long front high vowels, while a back dorsal remains after their short congeners. This type of quantity-sensitive pattern in assimilation has not been reported before. We use Centre of Gravity measurements to investigate this pattern of place assimilation, and argue for the use of an innovative normalisation technique for consonant measurements, based on measurements of /k/ aspiration in a linear regression model. We thus both expand the taxonomy of what is known to be possible in phonology and also provide new detail in the description of Liverpool English (including a proposal for the featural analysis of its vowel system).

Crosslinguistically rare sounds may be uncommon as a result of being phonologically marked (Trubetzkoy 1939) or due to articulatory or perceptual biases (Maddieson 1998). Certain types of sound changes are often argued to have roots in articulatory and perceptual biases (Blevins 2004). But in cases where there is limited data available, such as with understudied languages, it may be difficult to find evidence for the roots of sound changes. Synchronic variation can be used to provide evidence for diachronic sound changes (Blevins 2004; Lindblom 1990; Ohala 1993), which is particularly useful when historical data is limited. In this investigation we discuss phonetic biases, including acoustic and perceptual factors, that contribute to a set of sound changes in Tlingit, a critically endangered Indigenous language of Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon, that resulted in a primary split-merger (Blust 2012). This investigation provides further support for including explicit discussion of synchronic variation as part of the description of understudied languages. We propose that there should be a stronger emphasis on documenting and analyzing variation within understudied languages because excluding variation potentially masks significant intralinguistic and crosslinguistic phenomena.

Unequal outcomes in professional hiring for individuals from less privileged backgrounds have been widely reported in England. Although accent is one of the most salient signals of such a background, its role in unequal professional outcomes remains underexamined. This paper reports on a large-scale study of contemporary attitudes to accents in England. A large representative sample (N = 848) of the population in England judged the interview performance and perceived hirability of “candidates” for a trainee solicitor position at a corporate law firm. Candidates were native speakers of one of five English accents stratified by region, ethnicity, and class. The results suggest persistent patterns of bias against certain accents in England, particularly Southern working-class varieties, though moderated by factors such as listener age, content of speech, and listeners’ psychological predispositions. We discuss the role that the observed bias may play in perpetuating social inequality in England and encourage further research on the relationship between accent and social mobility.