This innovative collection brings together a range of perspectives on the notions of 'orderly heterogeneity' and 'social meaning', shedding light on how structured variation and indexicalities of social meaning 'cohere' within linguistic communities.

Karen V. Beaman is a Lecturer and post-doctoral researcher at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests concern language variation, coherence and change, with particular focus on how factors of identity, mobility, and social networks drive or inhibit change.

Gregory R. Guy is Professor at New York University, USA. His research focuses on social, geographic, and diachronic diversity in language, and the implications of linguistic variation for the construction of linguistic theory in varieties of English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

The coherence of linguistic communities: Orderly heterogeneity and social meaning

Karen V. Beaman and Gregory R. Guy

PART I. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES IN THE STUDY OF COHERENCE

1. False oppositions in the study of coherence

Devyani Sharma

2. Coherence across social and temporal scales

Meredith Tamminga and Lacey Wade

3. Indexicality and coherence

Gregory R. Guy, Livia Oushiro, and Ronald Beline Mendes

PART II. METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES IN THE STUDY OF COHERENCE

4. What's in a Lect? Coherence in Phonetic and Grammatical Variation

James A. Walker, Michol F. Hoffman, and Miriam Meyerhoff

5. Measuring change in lectal coherence across real- and apparent-time

Karen V. Beaman and Konstantin Sering

6. Looking for covariation in heritage Italian in Toronto

Naomi Nagy and Timothy Gadanidis

7. Measuring distance-based coherence

Benedikt Szmrecsanyi

PART III: SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF COHERENCE

8. How social salience can illuminate the outcomes of linguistic contact: Data from Spanish in Boston

Danny Erker

9. Mapping social and sociophonetic changes: Gender in Auckland English

Evan Hazenberg

10. Coherence and implicational hierarchies in the speech of the very old

Aria Adli

PART IV: PERCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF COHERENCE

11. Not anything goes: On implicational coherence and the penalty for being incoherent

Anne-Sophie Ghyselen and Stefan Grondelaers

12. Coherent patterns in nonstandard inflection in modern colloquial Standard Dutch?

Hans Bennis and Frans Hinskens

13. Coherence in a levelled variety: The case of Andalusian

Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda, Matilde Vida-Castro, and Álvaro Molina-García

PART V. EFFECTS OF STANDARD LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES ON COHERENCE

14. Identifying language varieties: Coexisting standards in spoken Italian

Massimo Cerruti and Alessandro Vietti

15. Language change in real-time: 40 years of lectal coherence in the Central Bavarian dialect-standard constellation of Austria

Philip C. Vergeiner, Dominik Wallner, and Lars Bülow

16. Coherence and language contact: Orderly heterogeneity and social meaning in Namibian German

Heike Wiese, Antje Sauermann, and Yannic Bracke

INDEX