Communicative competence comprises many things, including the ability to use the appropriate pronunciation, based on gender and style. Previous L2 research in phonology has focused on the frequency of nativelike and nonnative forms and variation within nonnative forms, rather than variation within nativelike forms. This study, however, examines variation in nativelike forms by investigating gender and stylistic differences in the English of native speakers and native speakers of Japanese and Spanish. The results of the native speakers demonstrated that there were significant differences based on gender and style. Both groups of nonnative speakers exhibited significant gender differences but only one group showed significant stylistic differences. The results suggest that gender differences are acquired before stylistic differences.Different versions of this article were delivered at the following conferences: EUROSLA, June 1999 in Lund, Sweden; NWAVE, October 1999 in Toronto, Canada; and SLRF, October 2003 in Tucson, Arizona.

The Levenshtein dialect distance method has proven to be a successful method for measuring phonetic distances between Dutch dialects. The aim of the present investigation is to validate the Levenshtein dialect distance with perceptual data from a language area other than the Dutch, namely Norway. We calculate the correlation between the Levenshtein distances and the distances between 15 Norwegian dialects as judged by Norwegian listeners. We carry out this analysis to see the degree to which the average Levenshtein distances correspond to the psychoacoustic perception of the speakers of the dialects.The present article reports on part of a study supported by NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. We are grateful for the permission from Kristian Skarbø and Jørn Almberg to use their material and for the help of Jørn Almberg during the whole investigation. We thank Saakje van Dellen for her obliging help with the data entry and Peter Kleiweg for letting us use the programs that he developed for the visualization of the maps and dendrograms in this article. Finally, we would like to thank John Nerbonne for valuable comments and for correcting our English.

This article examines the historical evolution of subject–verb concord in New Zealand English. We investigate the usage of the singular form of be with plural NP subjects (existentials and nonexistentials) over the past 150 years. The results demonstrate that the New Zealand English subject–verb concord system has undergone considerable reorganization during this time. Singular concord in nonexistentials occurred in early New Zealand English, but is now largely absent. In existentials, it steadily declined during the late 19th century, and then reversed this trajectory to become a well established feature of modern New Zealand English. Singular concord in New Zealand English existentials is now conditioned by a range of social and linguistic factors, and largely resembles other varieties in this respect.We are indebted to the ONZE team, particularly Elizabeth Gordon, Margaret Maclagan, and everyone involved in the collection and transcription of the corpora over the years. Thanks also to the students of Ling 203 2002 for their preliminary analysis of the data and lively discussion. Helpful feedback on this paper has been provided by David Britain, Elizabeth Gordon, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury, Peter Trudgill, Heidi Quinn, the audience at the New Zealand Linguistic Society conference, and three anonymous referees. The authors are listed in alphabetical order.

In Atlantic Canada Acadian communities, definite on is in competition with the traditional vernacular variant je…ons (e.g., on parle vs. je parlons “we speak”), with the latter variant stable only in isolated communities, but losing ground in communities in which there is substantial contact with external varieties of French. We analyze the distribution of the two variants in two Prince Edward Island communities that differ in terms of amount of such contact. The results of earlier studies of Acadian French are confirmed in that je…ons usage remains robust in the more isolated community but is much lower in the less isolated one. However, in the latter community, the declining variant, while accounting for less than 20% of tokens for the variable, has not faded away. Although it is not used at all by some speakers, it is actually the variant of choice for others, and for still other speakers, it has taken on a particular discourse function, that of indexing narration. Comparison with variation in the third-person plural, in which a traditional variant is also in competition with an external variant, shows that the decline of je…ons is linked to its greater saliency, making it a prime candidate for social reevaluation.An earlier version of this article was presented at UKLVC-3, held in July 2001 at the University of York, U.K. We thank audience members for comments. We also thank Raymond Mougeon, along with this journal's anonymous referees, for useful comments on an earlier written version. The research was funded by standard research grants awarded to King and Nadasdi by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.