The English low back vowel merger, where words like caught and cot are pronounced identically, is a well-studied phenomenon. Generally, these studies focus on mergers within given regions, comparing vowels of non-mobile individuals. My research differs in exploring the effects of relocation. I examine pronunciation differences of vowels in differently gendered twins from England who moved to Canada as children. Despite growing up in similar environments, their vowel patterns differ: there is some evidence of merger in the female’s but not the male’s vowels. This suggests that mobility and exposure to a new dialect may affect pronunciation changes but are not the sole factors.


 
 
 Food-market speech is an under-researched area of third-wave variationist sociolinguistic studies. This study addresses the gap by exploring food-market speech styles and hawker personae. Combining descriptive auditory analysis and online questionnaire data, I demonstrate that situated discursive practices of prosodic variables construct both persuasive and aggressive speech styles, and they are stereotypically associated with female and male hawker personae. Furthermore, this paper also explores the ideological construal of hawking as authentic market-ness, further revealing the semiotic saliency and social significance of food-market hawking as not only the language of a speech community but the language of market.
 
 


 The years leading up to the political handover of Hong Kong to Mainland China surfaced issues regarding national identification and intergroup relations. These issues manifested in Hong Kong films of the time in the form of film characters’ language ideologies. An analysis of six films reveals three themes: (1) the assumption of mutual intelligibility between Cantonese and Putonghua, (2) the importance of English towards one’s Hong Kong identity, and (3) the expectation that Mainland immigrants use Cantonese as their primary language of communication in Hong Kong. The recurrence of these findings indicates their prevalence amongst native Hongkongers, even in a post-handover context.

This research examines the production of glottal replacement i.e., /t/-glottaling in the speech of Edinburgh residents in 1975 and compares its findings to those in the existing literature to provide a better understanding of the variant’s spatial and temporal development in the area. Most of the results concur with those previously described as phonological factors and social class are concluded to be strong predictors of /t/-glottaling. Variation in preferred phonological environments is argued to be an effect of polygenetic roots. Absence of constraining effect for age is interpreted in light of the variant’s history in the region.

The recordings of 20 native German speakers were analysed to identify the strongest factors affecting the rates of word-final t-deletion. Deletion rates were shown to be higher for /t/s in semiweak verbs, when preceded or followed by sibilants, and in a conversational speaking style. In addition to this, frequent words showed higher deletion rates. English and German t-deletion were comparable to some extent in this study. However, deletion rates by morphological complexity showed differences between the languages: monomorphemic words, in particular, had lower deletion rates in German than in English. It was also shown that reading aloud reduces the deletion rates significantly which is in line with previous research.

Welcome to the first issue of the fourth volume of Lifespans & Styles , which features two papers that continue the journal’s original mission of highlighting excellence in undergraduate research while furthering case studies of intraspeaker variation in sociolinguistics. While this issue is smaller than previous issues, both papers are of exceptionally high quality and relevance to our field.

This forensically motivated study investigates the effects of a motorcycle helmet, balaclava, and plastic mask on the acoustics of three English non-sibilant fricatives, /f/, /θ/, and /v/ in two individuals. It examines variation within the individual as an effect of the physical environment. Two speakers recorded a list of minimal pairs in each of the three guises and with no face covering. The results showed that facewear significantly affected fricative intensity and the four spectral moments: centre of gravity, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis. The acoustic changes caused by facewear have implications for judging the reliability of earwitnesses’ content recall and voice identification as well as forensic speech scientists’ examination of content and speaker identity in disputed recordings.

This study investigates changes in code-switching (CS) patterns among Hindi-English bilinguals in Northern India. There is a dearth of studies of naturalistic Hindi-English CS, which this study attempts to address. By recording a group of three older speakers and one of three younger speakers, the study identifies generational differences in CS behaviour. Echoing Si’s (2010) results, it finds younger speakers using more English overall, preferring to alternate between fully English or fully Hindi clauses, while older speakers insert English items into Hindi clauses more often. Finally, the paper investigates how CS reflects and aids speakers’ (linguistic) identity construction in modern India.

Elderspeak refers to a speech style used when talking to the elderly. The aim of this study was to find out whether a higher rate of standard phonetic variants of phonemes is a feature of elderspeak. To test this, the (t) release in the speech of the radio presenter Kirsty Young was analysed, comparing her speech towards younger and older guests. A significant correlation was found between her rate of (t) release and the age of the guests. After analysing the results, an alternative account of elderspeak is presented as well as possible avenues of future research.