Sociophonetics and Multilingualism

The majority of the world’s population likely has been and currently is multilingual. However, work in sociophonetics has focused largely on monolingual communities. In this chapter, we explore recent work in this field that has sought to understand variation and change from a multilingual perspective. We review studies of phonetic variation that show how multilinguals draw on a rich, dynamic repertoire to establish, maintain, and contest complex identities using an “expanded variation toolkit” that reflects their multilingual background. We show how they use this information in speech processing to both understand speech and navigate their social worlds. Using data from a recent study, we show how growing up mono- or multilingually affects children’s ability to use phonetic variation in speech processing.