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Smartphone apps are ubiquitous: in 2018 in Germany alone, 79% of the population owned a smartphone. Virtually everyone in this cohort always carries with them a recording device and a notepad (i.e., a screen), two essential tools that linguists typically use in the field. In the present contribution we discuss how linguists can harness this ubiquity of linguistic tools in the population to capture language variation and change, illustrated through apps that were developed for German-speaking Europe. We present four apps (Dialäkt Äpp, Voice Äpp, Grüezi Moin Servus, and Deutschklang) that were developed to (a) engage with the public and (b) to collect linguistic data. We discuss opportunities (e.g., the multimodality of said devices), as well as challenges (e.g., maintenance, updating and the costs involved therein). Finally, we present new findings that have emerged from working with this new paradigm and speculate about future directions and developments in using smartphone apps to collect linguistic data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has revealed substantial between-speaker variation in speech rhythm, which in effect refers to the coordination of consonants and vowels over time. In the current proof-of-concept study, the hypothesis was investigated that these idiosyncrasies arise, in part, from differences in the tongue's movement amplitude. Speech rhythm was parameterized by means of the percentage over which speech is vocalic (%V) in the German pronoun "sie" [ziː]. The findings support the hypothesis: all else being equal, idiosyncratic %V values behaved proportionally to a speaker's tongue movement area. This research underlines the importance of studying language-external factors, such as a speaker's individual tongue movement behavior, to investigate variation in temporal coordination.