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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 40:2 (2019) ► pp.170–201

Supper or dinner?

Sociolinguistic variation in the meals of the day

| University of Toronto
| University of Toronto

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).

Keywords: language change, language variation, lexical variation, Canadian English, sociolinguistics, cascade model
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1An historical perspective
    • 1.2The meals of the day in North American English
  • 2.Data and methods
  • 3.Models for linguistic change across the landscape and over time
    • 3.1External factors
    • 3.2Internal factors
    • 3.3Mixed-effects statistical modeling
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00027.jan
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