Uses data from both sides of the U.S.-Canada border to test a model regarding the way language changes diffuse over space. Two cases are examined: the non-diffusion of phonetic features from Detroit to Windsor and the gradual infiltration into Canadian English of American foreign (a) pronunciations. (Author/VWL)

In a sociohistorical variation analysis of verb inflection in Early Modern British and American English, corpus-based comparisons focus on several extralinguistic and linguistic factors that have influenced the choice of forms over successive periods of time. Contrary to customary theories of "colonial lag," the rate of change was faster…

Reports on a longitudinal study of nearly 1,000 English words to determine differences in usage in the United States in the 1930s and 1990s related to age, sex, race, education, region, and rurality. The results indicated that males, whites, older speakers, and speakers from rural areas use more older terms, whereas most educated speakers use…