Flying high above the social radar: Coronal stop deletion in modern Appalachia K IRK H AZEN West Virginia University ABSTRACT In this paper I examine how a classic feature of variationist research, coronal stop deletion (CSD), operates at the end of the 20th century in one of the most renowned vernacular dialects in the United States, English in Appalachia. Through examination of CSD in a corpus of Appalachian speech, this paper also focuses on the methodological choices available. Several methodological questions are reviewed, such as the choices concerning voicing of the codas (wind vs. went vs. west). The corpus comprises interviews with 67 Appalachian speakers, yielding 17,694 tokens of potential CSD. These were analyzed using quantitative variationist methodology to reveal that morphological categories are less influential than even the preceding phonological environment. This finding is in stark contrast with some other vernacular varieties and suggests that apparent morphological influences are actually phonological influences that present themselves as morphological trends. Overall, the following phonological environment is overwhelmingly the most influential linguistic factor on the rate of CSD. These Appalachian speakers maintain relatively high rates, in effect constraining the social distinctions within Appalachia that could possibly be made using CSD, but marking them as vernacular speakers for those outside Appalachia. In general, we will find that consonant cluster simplification is a phonological process which intersects with grammatical processes, operating on a number of surface formatives to produce highly reduced surface forms, and the general rule which governs simplification can only be written when these grammatical forms are accurately known. —Labov, Cohen, Robins, & Lewis (1968:124) What was once seen as a vernacular feature of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has now been investigated as a common feature in varieties of English around the world. As Schneider (2004:1126) summarized, deleting the final consonant of a consonant cluster “is the norm in the Caribbean, in ethnic dialects and contact forms in Am[erican] E[nglish], in L[iberean] S[ettler] The author greatly appreciates the National Science Foundation for supporting this research (BCS- 0743489). The author would like to thank the research assistants of the West Virginia Dialect Project for their work with this project, especially Paige Butcher, Sarah Vacovsky, Jaime Wagner, Ashley King, Erin Simmons, Courey DeGeorge, Kyle Vass, and Elizabeth Spinelli. The author would also like to thank Ralph Fasold and Walt Wolfram for their comments on consonant clusters. 105 Language Variation and Change, 23 (2011), 105–137. © Cambridge University Press, 2011 0954-3945/11 $16.00 doi:10.1017/S0954394510000220