Recent work in sociolinguistic has started to explore variation beyond single variables and towards how multiple variables work together, known as covariation (Beaman & Guy, 2022). Covariation may be a source of social meaning in the forms of macrosocial identities (Guy, 2013), persona packages (Tamminga, 2019), and sound change clusters (Brand et al., 2021). However, there appears to be inconsistent covariation results in the literature (Nagy & Gadanidis, 2022).

Furthermore, only recently has sophisticated methods been employed for dealing with multivariate data. Brand et al. (2021) find socially meaningful vowel covariation in New Zealand English (NZE) using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). However, this method has yet to be tested on non-vocalic variables. Thus, this research addresses the gaps in the literature by exploring covariation between vowels and other segmental and suprasegmental variables using PCA on speakers of NZE.

The results find that only the vowel variables covary consistently with no other clusters across or within the different variables. The remaining variables are either working independently or show pairwise correlations. Reasons for this finding are explored.

References

Beaman, K. V., & Guy, G. R. (2022). The coherence of linguistic communities: Orderly heterogeneity and social meaning. In The Coherence of Linguistic Communities (pp. 1-13). Routledge.

Brand, J., Hay, J., Clark, L., Watson, K., & Sóskuthy, M. (2021). Systematic co-variation of monophthongs across speakers of New Zealand English. Journal of Phonetics, 88, 101096.

Guy, G. R. (2013). The cognitive coherence of sociolects: How do speakers handle multiple sociolinguistic variables? Journal of pragmatics, 52, 63-71.

Nagy, N., & Gadanidis, T. (2022). Looking for covariation in heritage Italian in Toronto 1. In The Coherence of Linguistic Communities (pp. 106-126). Routledge.

Tamminga, M. (2019). Interspeaker covariation in Philadelphia vowel changes. Language Variation and Change, 31(2), 119-133.