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Different types of features contribute to the linguistic distance between any two locations. Yet, the correlation between different feature types in defining patterns of dialectal variation represents an area of research still unexplored. In traditional dialectology, there is no obvious way to approach this matter beyond fairly superficial and impressionistic observations. This chapter summarises the results of a correlation study focusing on linguistic variation in an Italian region, Tuscany. By exploiting a multilevel representation scheme of dialectal data, the study analyses attested patterns of phonetic and morpho-lexical variation with the aim of testing the degree of correlation between phonetic variation and morpho-lexical variation, and between linguistic variation and geographic distance. The correlation analysis was carried out by combining two complementary approaches proposed in dialectometric literature, namely by computing both global and place-specific correlation measures and by inspecting their spatial distribution. The results demonstrate that phonetic and morpho-lexical variations in Tuscany seem to follow a different pattern than encountered in previous studies.

This chapter reviews previous feature theories and offers a new feature system, which is minimally sufficient to represent all contrasts and in which features are gestures of active articulators. The new system assumes seven articulators (lips, tongue tip, tongue body, tongue root, velum, larynx, and glottis)—the minimum any theory must recognize, and fewer features than in previous theories. Examples are given to illustrate how the new feature system represents various contrasts among consonants and vowels. I also discuss several questions that arise, in particular why there are so few contrasts, why there is phonetic variation in the realization of features, why phonetic variation of features is often language-specific, and whether new features are needed to represent patterns in sound classes.

While the relationship between phonetic variation and sexual orientation is documented in several languages, there are few data on Spanish-speaking contexts. This chapter details two tasks that address the perception of male sexual orientation in Puerto Rican Spanish. An explicit measures perception task analyzes uniformity of evaluations and correlations between perceived sexual orientation and perceived height, age, social class, and acoustic cues; a voice recognition task assesses the interaction between and syllable-final /s/. Results show uniform evaluations in clusters of listeners, correlation between perceived sexual orientation and height, and correlation between F2 frequencies of midfront vowel (/e/) tokens and evaluations of sexual orientation. Additionally, a d-prime analysis indicates that there is a weaker signal for the deleted variant stimuli when produced by gay-sounding talkers, and a three-factor mixed ANOVA found a significant main effect of perceived sexual orientation, with responses to gay-sounding talkers faster than those to straight-sounding ones.

This chapter discusses stereotypical perceptions of sexuality, ethnicity, and class in relation to a specific linguistic variation, namely, variation in /s/ in two different Copenhagen registers. It has been shown elsewhere that in one register, “modern Copenhagen,” the use of fronted /s/ changes the perception of the speaker quite dramatically, whereas in the other register, “street language,” it has no or little effect. In the analyses, the chapter uses intersectionality theory, queer theory, and social psychology to approach some of the general variationist issues of relations between variation and social meaning. The chapter uses correlation analyses to shed light on the stereotypes connected to /s/ variation in the two registers, and we argue that to young Copenhagen listeners it is actually the case that (stereotypically) all “gays” are “white” and all “immigrants” are “hetero.”