This article investigates intonation’s place in what Sarah Bunin Benor calls the American Jewish English repertoire, a collection of features that speakers can use to index Jewish identity. Results from a perceptual experiment show variation in which intonational contours listeners associate with Jewishness. Jewish listeners, particularly those with connections with Yiddish speakers, pick out a phonetically distinct rise-fall as indicating Jewishness; however, non-Jewish listeners hear a different set of contours—a less phonetically distinct rise-fall and a rise—as sounding Jewish. The author proposes that there is a unifying feature being perceived as “Jewish”: specifically, more macro-rhythmic contours (with regular alternations of high and low pitch) are heard as more Jewish. For Jewish speakers, only the contour with the greatest degree of macro-rhythm (the rise-fall with higher peaks) is heard as Jewish; for non-Jewish speakers, a lower degree of macro-rhythm suffices. Intonation thus behaves much like other parts of the sound system in that the social meaning of a particular linguistic feature is highly dependent on an individual’s linguistic and social history.

中文翻译：

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犹太英语语调中的宏韵律感

本文研究了语调在莎拉·布宁·贝诺 (Sarah Bunin Benor) 所称的美国犹太英语曲目中的位置，这是说话者可以用来索引犹太人身份的一系列特征。感知实验的结果显示，听者将语调轮廓与犹太人联系起来的变化。犹太听众，尤其是那些与讲意第绪语​​的人有联系的听众，会挑选出语音上明显的起伏来表示犹太人；然而，非犹太听众会听到一组不同的轮廓——发音上不太明显的上升-下降和上升——听起来像是犹太人。作者提出，有一个统一的特征被认为是“犹太人”：具体来说，更多的宏观节奏轮廓（高低音有规律的交替）被认为更犹太。对于讲犹太教的人来说，只有具有最大程度的宏观节奏（具有较高峰的上升-下降）的轮廓被听到为犹太人；对于非犹太人来说，较低程度的宏观节奏就足够了。因此，语调的行为与声音系统的其他部分非常相似，因为特定语言特征的社会意义高度依赖于个人的语言和社会历史。