Dialect contact: Results from the Accommodation Project and a research agenda

Abstract

The speech of migrant populations experiencing dialect contact provides insight into one of the key mechanisms of language change (Trudgill, 1986; Dodsworth, 2017) and patterns of dialect acquisition (Chambers, 1992; Tagliamonte & Molfenter, 2007; Nycz, 2011; Otheguy & Zentella, 2012). This talk presents an overview of results from the Accommodation Project (Oushiro, 2016), which has been systematically analyzing multiple sociolinguistic variables (prosodic, phonological and morphosyntactic) in a corpus specially built to disentangle the effects of Age of Arrival (AoA) and Length of Residence (LoR): forty Brazilian Portuguese speakers from the Northeastern states of Alagoas and Paraíba living in the Southeastern state of São Paulo, balanced for sex, AoA (-19 y.o.; 20+ y.o.), and LoR (-9 or 10+ years) (Oushiro, 2020). Our results show that while AoA and LoR distinguish phonetic and morphosyntactic variables, dialect acquisition also involves a complex web of differently defined regional and individual identities. Based on the results, I will further discuss a research agenda for dialect contact studies.