Supperordinner?

Abstract

The English words for daily meals constitute a complex lexical variable conditioned by social and linguistic factors. Comparative sociolinguistic analysis of 884 speakers from more than a dozen locations in Ontario, Canada reveals a synchronic system with social correlates that are reflexes of the British and American founder populations of the province. Toronto and Loyalist settlements in southern Ontario use the highest rates of dinner while northerners with European and Scots-Irish roots use supper. Dinner is taking over as the dominant form among younger speakers, exposing a cascade pattern (Trudgill 1972; Labov 2007) that is consistent with sociolinguistic typology (Trudgill 2011).

‘How do you get to Tim Hortons?’ Direction-giving in Ontario dialects

“…These differences may simply be the result of the fact that we sampled a minor sub-register of the varieties under investigation and are simply tapping into extant dialect differences. Indeed, the lack of a gender difference for most vernacular variants found in this study corroborates the findings found in other studies of Ontario dialects (e.g., Jankowski and Tagliamonte 2019, and Jankowski and Tagliamonte, to appear) and suggests that more studies of Ontario communities may expose additional dialect differences. However, more in-depth study of these specific variables with respect to local affiliation is necessary in order to fully understand these results.…”

Where didwergo? Lexical variation and change in third-person male adult noun referents in Old and Middle English

“…The second factor to consider is the written transmission. Given that lexical choices are known to shift from generation to generation (Tagliamonte & Brooke, 2014;Tagliamonte & Jankowski, 2019;Tagliamonte & Pabst, 2020), and the locus of linguistic change is generally acknowledged to be in spoken as opposed to written language (Milroy, 1992:32), the Old and Middle English extant manuscripts may leave the impression that this replacement was gradual even though the change may have been accelerated in spoken language but remained in the language in formal written contexts, as is attested in the extant manuscripts. 18 After all, there are well documented register effects that condition and constrain language variation and change (Biber, 2012), which may have contributed to the longevity of this lexical replacement.…”

“…Although geography is often reported as the predominant explanatory factor for lexical variation, lexis is highly structured along the axes of social and stylistic variation. In recent work, several lexical sets have been explored, such as dinner versus tea (Jankowski & Tagliamonte, 2019), words of profanity (Tagliamonte & Jankowski, 2019), adjectives of strangeness (Tagliamonte & Brooke, 2014), and adjectives of positive evaluation (Stratton, 2022b; Tagliamonte & Pabst, 2020).…”