Lifespans and Styles
Sociology
Lifespans & Styles is an Open Access journal that highlights outstanding undergraduate work in sociolinguistics.
Articles in this Journal
An Intraspeaker Variation Study of Scottish English /r/ Pharyngealisation
Pharyngealisation— the retraction of the tongue towards the pharynx— of prepausal and preconsonantal /r/ has been recognised as an emergent strategy of derhoticisation in Scotland’s Central Belt (Stuart-Smith 2007). However, previous studi...
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Sixty Years of Speech: A Study of Language Change in Adulthood
Research on language change has been complicated and hindered by the problem of obtaining quality data. In many cases, the large volume of time required to collect recorded speech at different intervals, as necessary in lifespan studies, i...
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Has Barack Obama Changed his Language in Later Life? A Case Study of -ing/-in Variation and the MOUTH Vowel
This paper aims to explore whether individual speakers can change their language at the phonological level across their lifespan, especially after the critical period, by conducting a longitudinal study on U.S. President Barack Obama at th...
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Achieving Native-like Pronunciation through Phonetic Analysis and Poetry
The problem of identifying phonetic phenomena related to language transfer and correction in second language (L2) production can be approached by conducting broad analyses of the same L2 speaker. This approach is applied in the present stu...
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Black Country English in the Spotlight: A Stylistic Analysis of Variable Contrast between Phonemes in an Urban Regiolect of British English
When examining the COT /CAUGHT merger in central Pennsylvania, Labov (1994) uncovered a stylistic phenomenon, known as the “ Bill Peters Effect” , whereby speakers heavily differentiate between /ɑ/ and /ɔː/ in spontaneous speech, but conve...
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Code-Switching as Strategically Employed in Political Discourse
There is extensive scholarship in the field of sociolinguistics on mediated political discourse as strategically employed to gain support in the run-up to and during elections. Among other things, this work reveals that the rhetorical succ...
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Goin’ Home: The Role of Vowel Raising in Indexing an Ethnic Identity
Vowel height can be seen as a feature indexing a particular ethnic identity or indicating a style shift between two such identities. This paper focuses on Bradford-born South Asian musician Zayn Malik, an interesting subject given his prom...
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De LaurentESE
An increasing amount of sociolinguistic research has been concentrated on diachronic idiolect change: the change of an individual’s dialect over time. This paper adds to this growing topic by analyzing the English idiolect change of Giada...
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"We Pray for Our Nation an(d) Our Worl(d)"
This paper examines the effect of race, context, and white public space on the extent to which speakers articulate, hyperarticulate, hypo-articulate, or glottalize word-final English alveolar stops -/t/ and -/d/ in the controlled environme...
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Attitudinal Judgments of Dialect Traits and Colorism in African Americans
This study demonstrates how language and complexion influence professional and social perceptions of African Americans. This study contains an online verbal-guise survey where participants either saw a photo of a lighter skin-toned African...
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“I didn’t fink dat was funny”
This paper examines the effect of middle and older age on Michael Caine’s realisation of the English dental fricatives. The results show convergence to prestige forms during middle age. Caine only exhibits TH- fronting during his older...
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“It makes It the Market”
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 onli...
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Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting Tense Variation in Singapore English
Despite English being the primary official language of Singapore, many of its citizens show deviations from Standard Singapore English (SSE) in speech or writing. In particular, it has been noted that Singapore English speakers may prod...
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Perceived Accentedness in Monolingual and Simultaneous Bilingual Children
Previous research on accentedness in simultaneous bilinguals has produced inconsistent results and has focused on adult speakers. The current study explores the question of whether simultaneous bilingual children are perceived to have s...
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