How is it possible that we can tell whether someone is from New York City or Texas or Minnesota simply by listening to their speech? The fact that ordinary people have no trouble with this task is a minor miracle! Sociolinguists and dialectologists have ignored the ability of naïve listeners to distinguish one dialect from another and to attach them to a specific geographical region. Recent wor...

Along with game theory, the emerging science of networks has given us a framework for analyzing social systems plausible to both intuition and implementation. As an interaction structure in computer simulation models, social networks provide a way to envision phenomena like information spread, dialect formation, and language change in a more robust way. In this sense a multitude of sociolinguis...

“Good” science fiction, if one may be allowed to propose such a definition, is that which transports its readers out of the banal and ordinary, into the world of the what if? and the alien. Writers of good science fiction naturally differ in their implementation of this, but some have opted to employ the more sophisticated tools of linguistics, constructing exotic alien languages or fragments t...

This paper reports on the current status of the short-a system in New York City English (NYCE), traditionally characterized as a phonemic split conditioned by the following phonological environment and a complex set of additional constraints (Labov 2007, Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006). We provide apparent-time evidence from twelve white native New Yorkers of three age groups that the complex shor...

Sociolinguistics and language contact studies have been since the work of Labov and Bickerton, to name just two major theoretical figures in the two fields, in search for adequate theoretical models. Due to the dominance of Chomskian linguistics in the 70s and 80s both made compromises with the logical machinery underlying Chomsky’s proposals: Labov designed since 1969 grammars with variable ru...

This paper offers a definition of language iconicity. And it studies it from a fresh perspective--sociolinguistics. The paper discusses it from the following five sections: social class corresponds to language diversity; traditional concept corresponds to word order iconicity and syntactic iconicity; intimity or estrangement corresponds to lexicalization; regional varieties correspond to differ...