Ancient Greek clusters of nasal (N) plus voiceless unaspirated (T) or voiced stop (D), merged to ND in Middle Greek, yielding ND or D in different modern dialects. Impressionistic studies suggest that currently there is stylistic variation between D and ND in all dialects, with ND as the high variant. Our study reveals that age, not style, is the most important factor in ND/D variation, with speakers under 40 using dramatically fewer ND tokens than older speakers; at the same time NT, a variant which reflects spelling conventions and is possible only across word boundaries, emerges as a careful style marker. This abrupt change of pattern coincides with important sociopolitical changes in Greece, such as the official demise of Katharevousa, the high variety of Greek diglossia. Thus, this change in apparent time suggests a real sound change in progress away from the previous pattern of stable variation. * (Modern Greek, diglossia, voiced stop prenasalization, stop-voicing) * We would like to thank Wolfson College, Oxford, and the Astor Travel Fund of the University of Oxford for providing the funds for the lead author to visit The Ohio State University where most of the data analysis was carried out. Thanks are also due to Mary Beckman for advice and help in Columbus, Bruce Connell for allowing us to use equipment from the Oxford University Phonetics Laboratory for the recordings in Greece, and the audiences at the Annual Meeting of the LSA (Los Angeles, 1993), and at seminars at Oxford and Reading Universities, for their helpful comments.
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