Prevelar raising and fronting has been documented as a “defining feature” of Pacific Northwest English yet its status nearby in California remains unclear. This paper investigates prevelar raising/fronting across four Californian field sites. Examining wordlist data from 276 white speakers, and sociolinguistic interview data from 64 white speakers, the current study shows that - contrary to previous assumptions - prevelar conditioning is not confined to the Pacific Northwest, but extensive throughout California. Results suggest that, in line with previous work in Washington and Oregon, this prevelar pattern is also on the decline among younger Californians, although the trajectory of change appears to differ from that observed in Washington (e.g. Riebold 2015). This paper complicates the notion of prevelar tensing, showing that F1 and F2 are not always operating in tandem: speakers who raise BAG, for example, do not always front BAG to the same degree, and vice versa. As this is yet more evidence that the West is broadly participating in similar vocalic patterns, this study tentatively explores historical migration events as one possible source for the contemporary Western vowel system.

中文翻译：

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使西方的孕前培养复杂化

Prevelar raise and fronting已被记录为太平洋西北英语的“定义特征”，但其在加利福尼亚附近的地位仍不清楚。本文调查了加利福尼亚四个野外地点的前期提升/正面。通过检查 276 名白人发言者的词汇表数据和 64 名白人发言者的社会语言学访谈数据，目前的研究表明 - 与之前的假设相反 - 初级条件反射不仅限于太平洋西北部，而是遍及整个加利福尼亚。结果表明，与之前在华盛顿和俄勒冈州的研究一致，这种早期模式在年轻的加利福尼亚人中也在下降，尽管变化的轨迹似乎与华盛顿观察到的不同（例如 Riebold 2015）。这篇论文使前张力的概念复杂化，表明 F1 和 F2 并不总是串联运行：例如，提高 BAG 的扬声器并不总是将 BAG 置于相同的程度，反之亦然。由于这进一步证明了西方广泛参与类似的发声模式，因此本研究试探性地探索历史迁移事件作为当代西方元音系统的一个可能来源。