Half a century ago, two works laid the foundation for modern sociolinguistics. Lewis (1969) studied a speech community using a system of symbols and grammatical rules and coordinating on the mapping from symbols to states of the world in order to communicate effectively. Economists and others built on Lewis’ work to erect the modern theory of conventions, their persistence and occasional transf...

What kinds of representations underlie listeners’ knowledge of the way different types of speakers speak (sociophonetic variation)? Listeners store information about the social conditioning of phonetic variation, and use this knowledge to inform their perceptions of speech. But are expectations about sociophonetic variation stored on the level of the word, or do they also apply to never-heard w...

Session 15 – Phonology-Consonants Sociolinguists have occasionally mentioned regressive assimilation of the voiced interdental fricative /ð/ to a preceding consonant as a feature of some vernacular dialects or at least " colloquial " speech. For example, Wolfram and Christian (1976) found tokens of an' nen for " and then " and all le for " all the. " However, there has been very little quantita...

This study investigates the effects of different elicitation methods on the speech of a single speaker of San Francisco English who is participating in a systematic set of vocalic sound changes known as the California Vowel Shift [6]. We contrast data obtained from classic sociolinguistic interview methods with data from self-recordings, as well as data from various methods for eliciting sponta...

Hong Kong English (HKE) has been the subject of a growing body of research over the last few decades. This article presents an overview of research into HKE from both linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. The first section reviews the linguistic features of HKE at phonological, grammatical and lexical levels as documented in the literature. In the second section of the article, the devel...