From Phonetic Variation to Linguistic Social Biomarkers: A Conceptual Review of the Pronunciation of English /t/

The English /t/ is among the most phonetically variable consonants in contemporary English, exhibiting multiple realizations that are shaped by linguistic, historical, and sociocultural factors. Although individual variants such as alveolar flapping, T-glottaling, unreleased /t/, and aspirated /t/ have been extensively investigated, existing research has largely examined these phenomena in isolation. This conceptual review integrates ev-idence from phonetics, sociophonetics, variationist sociolinguistics, linguistic anthro-pology, and communication studies to provide a comprehensive interpretation of English /t/ as a socially meaningful linguistic resource. The review first summarizes the principal phonetic realizations and traces their historical evolution across British and American English. It then critically examines how variation in /t/ is associated with major social determinants, including socioeconomic status, education, gender, age, regional identity, and communicative context. Building upon this interdisciplinary synthesis, the article proposes the concept of Linguistic Social Biomarkers and introduces the Theory of Lin-guistic Social Biomarkers (TLSB) as a conceptual framework for interpreting socially meaningful phonetic variation at the population level. Rather than functioning as de-terministic markers of individual identity, linguistic social biomarkers are understood as probabilistic indicators of broader processes of social organization, identity construction, and cultural change. This framework extends the sociological interpretation of pronun-ciation and provides a foundation for future interdisciplinary research on language, so-ciety, and human behavior.