California's San Francisco Bay Area has long been one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the United States, and ethnicity is an integral aspect of any research on language use in the region. This article gives a brief social history of San Francisco with respect to settlement patterns since the 1850s' gold rush, paying particular attention to Chinese Americans, who are argued to play an especially distinctive role in the city's history and current social landscape. This article also reviews the sociolinguistic research on language and ethnicity in and around San Francisco, with a focus on studies on variation and change in English, noting the relative lack of attention to Asian American ethnicities and calling for increased scholarship on the linguistic construction of Asian identities in the San Francisco area.

The acoustic properties of foreigner-directed speech are surprisingly understudied, and many existing studies evoke imagined interlocutors to elicit foreigner-directed speech. This study provides an acoustic comparison of foreignerdirected and native-directed speech in real and imaginary conditions. Ten native U.S. English speakers described the path between landmarks on a map to two confederate listeners (one native English speaker and one native Mandarin speaker) and to two imagined listeners (described as a native U.S. English speaker and a non-native speaker). Vowel duration, rate of speech, and vowel space size were examined across native/foreigner and real/imagined conditions. Stressed vowels were longer, rate of speech was slower, and vowel space distances were expanded in the foreigner-directed and imaginary conditions than in the native-directed and real ones. Speakers made acoustic-phonetic adjustments in foreignerdirected speech that are consistent with those seen in listener-directed clear speech, and these additional adjustments were made for both native and foreign listeners when the listener was imagined rather than real.

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to determine whether phonological variables are a potential resource for the expression of political identity, this article examines the second vowel of Iraq. in addition to being part of a politically significant place-name, Iraq is particularly wellsuited to index political identity due in part to the ideological association between the "foreign (a)" variable with correctness and educatedness in u.S. english (boberg 1997). Specifically, Iraq's second vowel appears to index political conservatism when produced as /á/ and political liberalism when produced as /a:/. results from an analysis of the u.S. House of representatives show that republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to use /á/, even controlling for regional accent.

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Vowel mergers are some of the most well-studied sound change phenomena, particularly in varieties of English. But although sociolinguists, dialectologists, and phoneticians are all interested in providing accurate and precise descriptions of an individual speaker's participation in a near-merger (or near-split), the methods for doing so vary widely, especially for researchers analyzing naturalistic corpora. In this paper, we consider four current methodological approaches to representing and assessing vowel distance and overlap: Euclidean distances between averages, Pillai-Bartlett trace (Hay et al., 2006), mixed effects regression modeling (Nycz 2013), and the spectral overlap assessment metric (Wassink 2006). We compare the advantages and disadvantages of each by applying all four methods to three separate data sets. These represent low vowel realizations by speakers from three different studies of English variation: one undergoing merger (COT and CAUGHT in San Francisco, California), one undergoing split, for the same contrast (COT and CAUGHT among Canadians in New York City), and one undergoing split, but for a different contrast (TRAP and BATH among Scots in England). By comparing the similarities and differences between the data sets themselves, as well as the differing analytic motivations for quantifying speaker-specific vowel overlap, we conclude with practical recommendations.

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