About

Erik Thomas is a professor in the Department of English at NC State University, born on December 29, 1965, in Columbus, Ohio. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from The University of Texas at Austin (1995), an M.A. in English from Texas A&M University (1989), and an A.B. in Botany from Duke University (1988). His research focuses on sociophonetics, dialectology, and language contact, with particular attention to African American English, Mexican American English, and immigrant Englishes around the world. Thomas has conducted acoustic analysis and speech identification experiments, and has worked on projects analyzing dialectal variation and phonetic features across different regions and communities. He has authored and edited several influential books, including 'Sociophonetics: An Introduction', 'Mexican American English: Substrate Influence and the Birth of an Ethnolect', and 'Immigrant Englishes around the World'. His scholarly work explores the development of dialects, the influence of Spanish on English in the Southwest, and the acoustic and phonetic characteristics of various English varieties. Thomas has contributed extensively to the understanding of language variation, change, and contact, and has been involved in various departmental committees at NC State. His research has significantly advanced the field of sociophonetics and dialectology.

Research topics

• Linguistics
• Pathology
• History
• Communication
• Medicine
• Cognitive psychology
• Internal medicine
• Psychology
• Physical therapy
• Developmental psychology
• Intensive care medicine
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Immigrant Englishes around the world

  2025-08-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Immigrant groups often develop their own dialects of the matrix language in their new country. These contact dialects are customarily called ethnolects, and various English-dominant nations have seen the rise of numerous ethnolects. Previous models of contact Englishes are designed primarily for colonial environments and are deficient for ethnolects that develop among groups that migrate to English-dominant countries. Here, we explore a model tailored to the latter situation. The remaining chapters in this volume explore how well the model fits a variety of ethnolects in several English-speaking nations.

  PublisherDOI

• Mexican American English

  2025-03-11

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Mexican American English is a collection of dialects that are spoken by Mexican Americans and exhibit substrate features from Spanish. It developed in various parts of the United States and was shaped both by the discrimination and exploitation that Mexican Americans faced and by changing educational practices. However, it represents a model case of how an immigrant group develops their own dialects of the matrix language. Numerous vocalic and consonantal variants and a few prosodic variants are well documented as stable aspects of Mexican American English. Morphosyntactic forms that endure well beyond the first generation of English‐speaking Mexican Americans have proved harder to isolate. Mexican American English is not simply Spanish interference features, but represents a winnowing of interference features across generations of Mexican Americans.

  PublisherDOI

• Immigrant Englishes Around the World

  2025-08-08

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Identifying meaningful aspects of health and concepts of interest for assessment in systemic lupus erythematosus: implications for digital clinical measure development

  Journal of Patient-Reported Outcomes · 2024-12-24 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  OBJECTIVES: Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a chronic autoimmune disease with heterogeneous clinical manifestations which significantly impacts the daily lives of patients. Herein, we aimed to (i) investigate patients' perspectives on and experience with SLE; (ii) identify meaningful aspects of health (MAHs) and concepts of interest (COIs) in SLE that could be evaluated using digital clinical measures (DCMs); and (iii) identify target DCMs for their assessment. METHODS: A mixed-methods, multistep approach was deployed for (i) exploring patients' experience with SLE through a social media listening study and focused group discussions with patients; (ii) mapping patients' experiences to define MAHs and identify COIs measurable using DCMs; (iii) selecting DCMs for the target COIs; and (iv) identifying types of wearable sensors for measuring COIs in the patients. RESULTS: Six MAHs related to physical behavior and sleep were identified: difficulty in ambulating, lack of energy, inability to perform activities of daily living, difficulty engaging in sustained walking, inability to perform leisure activities and exercise, and lack of restful sleep. Measurable COIs represented walking (fatigue and pain) and sleep (sleep and pain) characteristics. Five and six DCMs related to stepping behavior and sleep quality, respectively, were identified. Several wearable sensors are available to derive DCMs for physical behavior and sleep; however, patients showed a strong preference for a wrist-worn actigraphy sensor. CONCLUSION: We identified DCMs for physical behavior and sleep that are relevant and meaningful to patients with SLE, measurable in a real-world environment with wearable sensors, and have the potential to aid personalized patient care.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Regional vowel patterns as shown by discrete cosine transforms

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2024-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This project presents a new approach to analyzing geographical patterning in vowel variation that combines discrete cosine transforms (DCTs) with cluster analysis. It offers a means of reducing bias from analyses of geographical patterning in vowel variation. DCT0 and DCT1 capture the overall position of vowels in the vowel envelope and DCT2 adds information about curvature. To mitigate anomalies, these metrics are based on numerous tokens and measurement points. Cluster analysis can then be applied to the DCT data to indicate which speakers are most similar without predetermined groupings. The procedure suggests how vowel realizations are correlated with geographical divisions, if at all, within the area covered by a dialect survey. Here, we apply DCTs and hierarchical clustering to a corpus of speakers born 1970 or later and covering eastern Ohio, West Virginia, and western North Carolina. The results align only partially with isophones from earlier dialect surveys. Analyses of individual vowel phonemes typically exhibit considerable intermixture of forms; clearer geographic patterns emerge primarily when multiple vowels in named chain shifts are considered together. Recent dialect leveling appears to play a role in the paucity of distinguishable regional patterns.

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the anatomy of articulation rate in spontaneous English speech: relationships between utterance length effects and social factors

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-08-13

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Speech rate has been shown to vary across social categories such as gender, age, and dialect, while also being conditioned by properties of speech planning. The effect of utterance length, where speech rate is faster and less variable for longer utterances, has also been shown to reduce the role of social factors once it has been accounted for, leaving unclear the relationship between social factors and speech production in conditioning speech rate. Through modelling of speech rate across 13 English speech corpora, it is found that utterance length has the largest effect on speech rate, though this effect itself varies little across corpora and speakers. While age and gender also modulate speech rate, their effects are much smaller in magnitude. These findings suggest utterance length effects may be conditioned by articulatory and perceptual constraints, and that social influences on speech rate should be interpreted in the broader context of how speech rate variation is structured.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exploring the anatomy of articulation rate in spontaneous English speech: relationships between utterance length effects and social factors

  2024-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Code and Data for "Exploring the anatomy of articulation rate in spontaneous English speech: relationships between utterance length effects and social factors", accepted for presentation at Interspeech 2024, Kos, Greece, 1-5th September.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Wiebke H. Ahlers, Consonantal sound change in American English: An analysis of clustered sibilants (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. xii + 233. ISBN 9781316512722.

  English Language and Linguistics · 2024-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Wiebke H. Ahlers, Consonantal sound change in American English: An analysis of clustered sibilants (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. xii + 233. ISBN 9781316512722. - Volume 29 Issue 2

  PublisherDOI

• Acoustic correlates of aspirated consonants in Maranao

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2023-03-01

  articleCorresponding

  Aspirated obstruents are rare in Austronesian languages, one exception being the southern Philippine language Maranao, as reported by Lobel and Riwarung [Oceanic Linguist. 48, 403–438 (2009)]. In Maranao, aspirated consonants occur as a reflex of a cluster of a former voiced stop and a homorganic obstruent (*bp > p’, *dt > t’, *ds > s’, *gk> k ’). The most obvious correlate to non-Maranao speakers is a dramatic raising of the following vowel, which also occurs after voiced obstruents, but not after historic single voiceless obstruents—e.g., /təkaw/ [təkaw] ‘startled’ (earlier *təkaw) vs. /tək’aw/ [təkʰɣw] ‘thief’ (earlier *təɡkaw) However, native Maranao speakers regard the raising as a property of the consonants, not the vowels. We examined the correlates of the apparent aspiration. The vowel raising is realized robustly and consistently, with some overlap in F1/F2 space among contrastive vowels. However, aspirated and unaspirated stops also show differences in VOT and in measures of breathiness of the following vowel, albeit with somewhat less consistency. Differences between /s/ and /s’/ were not evident except for realizations of following vowels. We explore the role of pharyngeal expansion due to voicing in the development of these Maranao segmental realizations.

  PublisherDOI

• Towards a novel clinical outcome assessment for systemic lupus erythematosus: first outcomes of an international taskforce

  Nature Reviews Rheumatology · 2023 · 26 citations

  • Medicine
  • Intensive care medicine
  • Physical therapy
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tyler Kendall

  Neuroscience Institute

  15 shared

• Jeff Mielke

  North Carolina State University

  12 shared

• Belinda Treviño Schouten

  11 shared

• Mary Kohn

  Kansas State University

  9 shared

• Erin Callahan

  9 shared

• Robert Bayley

  9 shared

• Jane Stuart‐Smith

  8 shared

• Morgan Sonderegger

  7 shared

Labs

• Research and EngagementPI

Education

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  University of Texas at Austin

  1995