The Sociophonetic and Acoustic Vowel Dynamics of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula English (original) (raw)
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Multiple vectors of unidirectional dialect change in eastern New England
2014
"Traditional eastern New England (ENE) dialect features are rapidly receding in many parts of northern New England. Because this ENE shift involves seven different phonological features, it provides a prime opportunity to explore different rates of change across multiple linguistic variables at the same time in the same social setting. The present study is the first acoustic sociophonetic investigation of central New Hampshire, and it is based on new field data from 51 adult speakers. Results show that young generations are discarding many traditional ENE pronunciations in favor of leveled, nonregional forms, yet the changes are affecting some variables more quickly than others. Many distinctive traditional ENE variants (nonrhotic speech, intrusive-r, fronted FATHER, “broad-a” in BATH) are quickly receding, while others (fronted START and HOARSE/HORSE distinction) are somewhat more conservative, being “overshadowed” by the presence of (r) as a variable within the same syllable. We frame our apparent-time analysis in terms of Sankoff’s (2013a) notion of “age vectors” and Labov’s (2012) “outward orientation” of the language faculty, illustrating how different generations are juggling multiple age vectors within the same overall shift, and how one variable can overshadow another variable within the same syllable."
Previous studies of border regions have characterized linguistic divergence as a natural consequence of the social psychological and cognitive processes speakers apply in constructing their conceptualizations of the border and those on the other side (Auer 2005). For the border shared by Canada and the United States, in particular, Boberg (2000) highlights a resistance to the diffusion of sound change across the national border. While providing some valid descriptions, these assessments neglect the multi-faceted social function of language to both unite and distinguish speakers and social groups. They also ignore the potentially important role of cultural affinity and regional solidarity spanning a national border. As Irvine & Gal (2000) explain, ideological processes that serve to project contrasts occur recursively and simultaneously with processes that ideologically erase other contrasts at different levels of the system. These ideological processes have consequences for linguistic structure and for sound change. With its strong regional solidarity spanning the U.S.-Canadian border and lack of previous trans-border comparisons in the region, the Pacific Northwest is an ideal site to examine the effects of these ideological processes. Despite the geographic proximity and cultural similarities of Vancouver, B.C. and Seattle, WA, few studies have directly compared their speech (see Sadlier-Brown 2012 for one exception). The Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006) describes the difficulty of differentiating “the West” as a dialect region from “Canada” and concludes that this must be done on the basis of their degrees of participation in similar sound changes. The ANAE relies on single time-point measurements for vowels, however, and does not examine variation in dynamic formant trajectories across the dialects, though these have been shown to differentiate dialects and ethnolects in previous work (Janson & Schulman 1983, DeDecker & Nycz 2006, Fox & Jacewicz 2009, Jacewicz & Fox 2012, Scanlon & Wassink 2010, Koops 2010, Risdal & Kohn 2014). Prior research in B.C. has focused on the region’s participation in features of the Canadian Shift such as /æ/ retraction and its questionable participation in raising of /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ (Chambers 1973, Esling & Warkentyne 1993, Hall 2000, Sadlier-Brown & Tamminga 2008, Boberg 2008, Pappas & Jeffrey 2014). These studies of Vancouver vowels have relied on single-point measurements. In Seattle, on the other hand, research primarily documents pre-velar raising of /æ/ before /g/ (Wassink 2009, Freeman 2013, Riebold 2012, 2014 and 2015). No large-scale studies have compared these features between Vancouver and Seattle speakers using dynamic methods. With 29,372 audio-recorded vowel tokens collected via a word list reading task from a gender and age-balanced sample of 20 Seattle and 19 Vancouver speakers, the current study provides a variationist sociophonetic analysis of speakers’ participation in five diagnostic dialectal features of Seattle English and Vancouver English: pre-velar /æ/ raising, pre-nasal /æ/ raising, /æ/ retraction, and the “Canadian” raising of diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/. Measurements for the current study were extracted at five duration-proportional points and comparisons of formant trajectories were included in the mixed-effects linear regression models for each diagnostic dialect feature. In addition, sociocultural interviews were conducted with each participant to better understand the speakers’ orientations toward their regional and national identity as well as the cultural and linguistic ideologies they embraced. The study also considers variation between two emically-defined age groups of young adult speakers. The results suggest that Seattle and Vancouver speakers are participating in some of the same allophonic processes, like /æg/ raising, but they are also differentiated by other processes including /æn/ raising, /æ/ retraction, /aʊ/ raising, /aɪ/ raising. In these cases, the distinction between Seattle and Vancouver relates to the degree to which a phonetic process has been phonologized, and this distinction can most accurately be captured in the phonetic form of the feature using dynamic analyses. Seattle and Vancouver speakers are also found to embrace asymmetrical language ideologies, and these act as a predictor of their linguistic behavior for features undergoing sound change. In addition, variation between the two emically-defined age groups highlights the differential use of sociolinguistic resources by speakers within the same broader age group of "adult" speakers. This research sheds light on the relationship between phonetic form, sound change and socio-indexical meaning. It also documents the variation within a less studied dialect region divided by a national border and offers a realistically complex view of the simultaneous solidarity and differentiation of identity embodied by its inhabitants.
The Times They Are A-Changin': (ING) Variation and Dialect Leveling in Raleigh, NC
A capstone project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts English Raleigh 2013 APPROVED BY: _____________________________ ________________________ Advisor Director of Graduate Programs In submitting this capstone project, I understand that my abstract will be posted in the M.A. program's online public archive and that the full text will be stored electronically in a departmental archive. _____________________________ ________________________ Student Signature Date ABSTRACT JON ROBERT FORREST, JR. The Times They Are A-Changin': (ING) Variation and Dialect Leveling in Raleigh, NC. (Under the direction of Professor Robin Dodsworth.) (IN)/(ING) alternation is the prototypical "stable" phonetic variable in English. Rather than moving toward completion, it shows consistent internal and social factors. While it is normally shown not to be changing over time, the loss of other Southern linguistic features in Raleigh suggests that this feature may be undergoing change as well.
Dialectal variation in the rising accents of American English
Laboratory phonology, 2007
In Pierrehumbert (1980) three rising accents are posited for English, H*, L+H* and L*+H, but this three-way contrast has often been disputed. In the present experiment, Minnesotan and Southern Californian speakers read two dialogs which included four levels of emphasis. Emphasis lengthened segmental duration, raised the scaling of all tones and delayed H alignment in L+H*. Independently of emphasis effects, in both dialects L+H* and L*+H were used in different contexts and were phonetically distinct, with L*+H showing later alignment of both tones, lower scaling of L, and higher scaling of H. In addition, there were phonetic differences between the two dialects, with Southern Californian showing later alignment than Minnesotan English.
Changing words or changing rules? Second dialect acquisition and phonological representation
How do speakers who move to a new dialect region acquire phonological features of the new dialect? While social factors surely play an important role, second dialect acquisition must be constrained by aspects of the linguistic system: the form of phonological representations, their malleability, and the processes that manipulate them to yield surface forms. Second dialect data thus has the potential to shed light on foundational questions in phonological theory. This paper reviews two prominent models of phonological representation -- Generative Phonology and Usage-based Phonology -- and sets out the predictions each makes regarding how particular kinds of second dialect features may be acquired. These predictions are then evaluated against the results of a sociolinguistic study of mobile adults who acquired their native dialect of English in Canada and later moved to the New York City region, focusing on evidence of change with respect to two features: the cot/caught distinction and height of /ɑU/ in Canadian Raising environments. It is argued that the results of this study can best be accounted for within a usage-based model in which phonological representations are both phonetically rich and linked to social labels.
Producing and perceiving the Canadian Vowel Shift: Evidence from a Montreal community
Language Variation and Change, 2017
This paper investigates interspeaker variation in the mid and low short vowels of Jewish Montreal English, analyzing the Canadian Shift in both production and perception. In production, we find that young women are leading in the retraction of /æ/ and the lowering and retraction of /ε/. We furthermore find that across speakers, the retraction of /æ/ is correlated with the lowering and retraction of /ε/, providing quantitative evidence that the movements of these two vowels are linked. The trajectory implied by our production data differs from what was reported in Montreal approximately one generation earlier. In contrast to reliable age differences in production, a vowel categorization task shows widespread intergenerational agreement in perception, highlighting a mismatch: in this speech community, there is evidently more systematic variation in production than in perception. We suggest that this is because all individuals are exposed to both innovative and conservative variants an...
2020
The Minnesota dialect of American English is often confused with some vague "Canadian English" (Bartholdi 2015). 2 The current study aims to identify precisely which Canadian dialect of English. In so doing, we extract F1 and F2 measurements of 11 monophthong vowels of English ([i, ɪ, e, ɛ, ae, ɑ, ɔ, o, ʊ, u, ʌ]) produced by 20 Northern Minnesota speakers (10 males and 10 females) and compare and contrast the same set of vowels produced by 10 speakers (5 males and 5 females) of Winnipeg Canadian English whose vowels were measured by Hagiwara (2006). Our findings confirm the impressionistic claims that Northern Minnesotans sound like Canadians. The sociophonetic investigation shows that the phonological processes that raise the "face" vowel [e] over the "kiss" vowel [ɪ], those that front and lower the "foot" [ʊ], and those that have caused the "lot" vowel [ɑ] and the "cloth" vowel [ɔ] to merge are the same in both dialects. However, in our considered opinion, the most important contribution of this paper to variationist sociolinguistics is "the discovery" that male Northern Minnesota English (NMNE) sound like males in Winnipeg Canadian English (WCE) speakers because of F1, while female NMNE speakers sound like female WCE speakers because of F2.
A longitudinal analysis of the durability of the Northern-Midland dialect boundary in Ohio
The boundary between the North and midland dialects in ohio represents an unusually clear opportunity to test how well dialect boundaries can persist. For part of this boundary, the original settlement by European Americans was strongly segregated: the area north of the line was heavily dominated by settlers from a hearth running from western New England through upstate New York, while the area south of it was dominated by settlers from a hearth comprising southern Pennsylvania, western maryland, and northern Virginia and West Virginia. recordings of Dictionary of American Regional English survey subjects, born 1880-1908, were compared with subjects, born 1970-94, from a new survey. A number of variables involving vowel quality or vowel mergers that are known or suspected to differentiate the North and midland were analyzed in these subjects' speech. Eight variables showed statistically significant differences according to dialect region. When these variables were combined quantitatively, the patterns that emerged are that the North and midland remain robustly differentiated but that a transition zone has developed along the boundary.