-
A Real-Time Trend Study of the Southern Vowel Shift in Kentuckiana American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-26 Brian José
This article examines both the front and back shifts of the Southern Vowel Shift in a rural Kentuckiana (south-central Indiana) community through 50 years of real time, from the middle of the 20th century to the early 21st century. Euclidean distance measurements between the pair of high front vowels FLEECE & KIT and between the pair of mid front vowels FACE & DRESS are subjected to ANOVAs. The mid
-
Naturalistic Double Modals in North America American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-26 Steven Coats
Double modals are a well-known non-standard feature of some regional varieties of English in North America, but due to their rareness in spoken language, questions remain as to the inventory of possible combinatorial types and the geographic extent of their use in contemporary naturalistic speech. This study investigates double modals in the Corpus of North American Spoken English (CoNASE), a 1.2-billion-word
-
Cross-speaker covariation across six vocalic changes in New York City English American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-26 Bill Haddican,Cecelia Cutler,Michael Newman,Christina Tortora
This article examines differences in the way that innovative variants for six vocalic changes in New York City English—too-fronting, raising of price and face and lowering of bad, thought and dress—co-occur across speakers, and explores social correlates of these patterns of covariation. We report on an analysis of a recently developed corpus of conversational speech from 140 speakers. The analysis
-
Second Dialect Acquisition “in real time”: Two longitudinal case studies from YouTube American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-26 Andrew Cheng
Longitudinal tracking of second dialect acquisition (SDA) normally requires carefully planned data collection and years of patience. However, the rise of self-recorded public speech data on internet archives such as YouTube affords researchers with a novel way of tracking language change over time. This paper presents two case studies of YouTube vloggers who have recorded their voices over the course
-
The Martini-Henry Rifle and the Origin of Martini as the Name of the Cocktail American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Lowell Edmunds
-
American Speech, Settler Colonialism, and a View from a Place Currently Called Canada American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Derek Denis,Alexandra D’arcy
-
Language Along the Levee: Just Another Big Slice of the American Pie American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Michael D. Picone
-
Oppositional Identity and Back-Vowel Fronting in a Triethnic Context: The Case of Lumbee English American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Marie Bissell,Walt Wolfram
This study considers the dynamic trajectory of fronting of the back vowels boot and boat for 27 speakers in a unique, longstanding context of a substantive, triethnic contact situation involving American Indians, European Americans, and African Americans over three disparate generations in Robeson County, North Carolina. The results indicate that the earlier status of Lumbee English fronting united
-
ADS, The Society’s Dictionary, and Anglocentrism American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Michael Adams
-
Just What is “American Speech” Anyway? American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Michael D. Picone
-
American Speech in Action: Policy versus Practice American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Joseph Salmons
-
A Note on the Productivity of the Alternative Embedded Passive American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Daniel Duncan
-
Filipinos Front Too! A Sociophonetic Analysis of Toronto English /u/-Fronting American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Pocholo Umbal
The fronting of the back vowel /u/is an ongoing sound change in many varieties of English. While /u/-fronting is argued to be primarily phonetically constrained, many studies report the significant role of various social factors, including ethnicity. This article investigates the linguistic and social conditioning of /u/-fronting in Toronto English. A sociophonetic analysis of /u/, extracted from spontaneous
-
Expanding Our View of Linguistic Expertise American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 David Johnson
-
Differences in final /z/ realization in Southwest and Northern Virginia American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-07-11 Rachel Hargrave,Amy Southall,Abby Walker
Two apparently contradictory observations have been made about consonantal voicing in Southern US English: compared to other US varieties, Southern speakers produce more voicing on “voiced” stops, but they also “devoice” word-final /z/ at higher rates. In this paper, regional differences in final /z/ realization within Virginia are investigated. 36 students from Southwest and Northern Virginia were
-
Complicating prevelar raising in the West American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-07-11 Lewis Esposito,Emily Lake
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
-
‘Backwards talk’ in Smith Island, Maryland American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-07-11 Natalie Schilling
This article presents an exploration of the discourse-level phenomenon known as ‘backwards talk’ in Smith Island, a small, endangered dialect community in Maryland’s Chespaeake Bay, on the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast. The article examines how backwards talk, basically pervasive, highly creative irony, compares with irony more generally; how it patterns across generations and contexts; how important it
-
A-prefixing in Linguistic Atlas Project data American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-07-11 Allison Burkette,Lamont Antieau
This paper discusses the linguistic, social, and geographic distribution of a-prefixing data in the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) of North America. Over 3800 instances of the a-prefix were extracted for analysis from the LAP interview data of 1527 speakers from across the United States, collected between 1931 and 2006. While the LAP a-prefix data do not generally deviate from patterns observed in
-
Regional Patterns in Prevelar Raising American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-07-11 Joseph A. Stanley
Prevelar raising is the raising of TRAP and DRESS vowels before voiced velars. While BAG-and BEG-raising have been described in Canada, the Upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, an in-depth investigation of their distribution across North America is lacking, especially for BEG. Using an online survey distributed to over 5,000 participants via Reddit (which skews towards younger White males) and
-
-
Toward an Affective Perspective in Minoritized Youth-Centered Research and Education American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Amelia Tseng
-
Teaching the Value of Language Variation and Linguistic Diversity through the “Standard English Challenge” American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Nicoleta Bateman
-
Discovery Learning in the Sociolinguistics Classroom American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Katie Welch
-
The Norm Orientation of English in the Caribbean American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-24 Dagmar Deuber,Stephanie Hackert,Eva Canan Hänsel,Alexander Laube,Mahyar Hejrani,Catherine Laliberté
This study examines newspaper writing from ten Caribbean countries as a window on the norm orientation of English in the region. English in the former British colonies of the Caribbean has been assumed to be especially prone to postcolonial linguistic Americanization, on account of not just recent global phenomena such as mass tourism and media exposure but also long-standing personal and sociocultural
-
The Complex History of Have Gotten in American English American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-03-24 Lieselotte Anderwald
This article challenges the accepted opinion that the American English perfect form HAVE gotten is a straightforward historical retention of an earlier British English form. Although HAVE gotten was presumably part of the settler input in North America, it (almost) died out in American English as well, but was then revived in the nineteenth century, as historical corpus data show. Contrary to expectations
-
Local Meanings for Supralocal Change American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2021-02-01 Dan Villarreal,Mary Kohn
While the retraction of trap is found throughout the American West, it is primarily associated with California and supposed Californian values in both the popular media and the ears of Californian listeners. This study investigates the local construction of meaning for a supralocal sound change by examining perceptions of trap backing in Kansas, a locale that has also undergone front lax vowel retraction
-
North versus South: Regional Patterns of Grammatical Variation in Nineteenth-Century American English American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-11 Stephen Levey,Gabriel DeRooy
We reconstruct the inherent variability found in mid-nineteenth-century American English by drawing on a corpus of semi-literate correspondence, the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL), rich in non-standard grammatical features. The primary focus is on a comparison of morpho-syntactic variability (was/were variation and restrictive relativization strategies) in letters written between 1861
-
Dynamics of Short a in Montreal and Quebec City English American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-12-11 Michael Friesner,Laura Kastronic,Jeffrey Lamontagne
This study compares the effects of city and ethnicity with respect to Quebec English speakers’ participation in two ongoing changes affecting /æ/ in Canadian English: retraction as part of the Canadian Shift and tensing in prenasal environments. Quebec English speakers might be expected to differ in their behavior with regard to these two phenomena as compared to other Canadian English speakers. Based
-
Language Rights and Social Justice in the Classroom American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-11-01 Ian Cushing
-
How to Make New Use of Existing Resources: American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-11-01 Turo Vartiainen,Mikko Höglund
This article discusses the history and regional variation of the complex preposition off of (e.g., I got off of the bus). The study is intended to uncover detailed information about the use of the form from Early Modern to Present-Day English by examining a variety of linguistic corpora and databases from different perspectives. In addition to charting the history and present-day variation of off of
-
A Little of Everything: A Comprehensive Overview for the Linguistic Study of Television Dialogue American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-11-01 Hayley Heaton
-
Revisiting Invariant am in Early African American Vernacular English American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-11-01 John McWhorter
Scholars of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have generally assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of Black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier Black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in renditions of interviews with ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have
-
Wait, It’s a Discourse Marker American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-10-23 Sali A. Tagliamonte
This study investigates a discourse-pragmatic use of the word wait in spoken North American English. This function is an extension from an original lexical meaning of pausing or lingering which has extended to indicate a pause in discourse as a speaker reflects on or corrects an earlier topic. Over 340 examples from 211 individuals permit comparative sociolinguistic methods and statistical modelling
-
The Influence of Institutional Affiliation and Social Ecology on Sound Change American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-10-23 Michael J. Fox
The social mechanisms that influence the direction of language change operate along the demarcations of networks of communication (Bloomfield 1933; Milroy and Milroy 1985). Within geographic regions, the focused organizations that individuals participate in structure the lines of communication (Feld 1981) and the socio-demographic composition (social ecology) therein limits the options of peers to
-
The Rise and Fall of the Northern Cities Shift American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-10-23 Monica Nesbitt
Recent acoustic analyses examining English in the North American great lakes region show that the area’s characteristic vowel chain shift, the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), is waning. Attitudinal analyses suggest that the NCS has lost prestige in some NCS cities, such that it is no longer regarded as ‘standard American English’. Socio-cultural and temporal accounts of capital loss and dialect decline
-
The ‘U’ and ‘V’ Alternation in the History of English American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-09-17 Peter J. Grund,Matti Peikola,Johanna Rastas,Wen Xin
In the Early Modern English period (roughly 1500s–1700s), the use of the letters and
went through a change from a positionally constrained system (initial , medial ) to a system based on phonetic value, with marking vowel and consonant sounds. The exact dynamics of this transition have received little attention, however, and the standard account is exclusively based on printed -
-
The Perception of Macro-rhythm in Jewish English Intonation American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Rachel Steindel Burdin
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
-
The Foot of the Lake: A Sharp Dialect Boundary in Rural Northern New York American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Aaron J. Dinkin
In 2013, Dinkin reported an unexpectedly sharp dialect boundary in northern New York between the communities of Ogdensburg and Canton in St. Lawrence County: Ogdensburg exhibited the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS) and very little evidence of the low back merger, while Canton showed low back merger nearing completion and no NCS. This article investigates the nature of this dialect boundary via new
-
The Gettysburg Corpus: Testing the Proposition that All Tense /æ/s Are Created Equal American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-26 Isaac L. Bleaman,Daniel Duncan
Corpus studies of regional variation using raw language data from the internet focus predominantly on lexical variables in writing. However, online repositories such as YouTube offer the possibility of investigating regional differences using phonological variables, as well. This paper demonstrates the viability of constructing a naturalistic speech corpus for sociophonetic research by analyzing hundreds
-
Interesting fellow or tough old bird? 3rd person male referents in Ontario American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-21 Karlien Franco,Sali A. Tagliamonte
English has many words to refer to an adult man, e.g. man, guy, dude, and these are undergoing change in Ontario dialects. This paper analyzes the distribution of these and related forms using data collected in Ontario, Canada. In total, N = 6788 tokens for 17 communities were extracted and analyzed with a comparative sociolinguistics methodology for social and geographic factors. The results demonstrate
-
A Modern Update on New England Dialectology: Introducing the Dartmouth New England English Database (DNEED) American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-21 James N. Stanford
-
A pan-Atlantic ‘multiple modal belt’? American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-21 Davide Zullo,Simone E. Pfenninger,Daniel Schreier
Multiple modality is spread across the wider Atlantic region, both within individual varieties and across variety types. Based on corpus-based evidence, it is argued that first and second tiers of multiple modals carry high diagnostic value and that regionally separated Anglophone areas differ in their preference for first- and second-tier components in modal constructions. Semantics is a diagnostic
-
A production and perception study of /t/ glottalization and oral releases following glottals in the US American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-06-21 David Ellingson Eddington,Earl Kjar Brown
The articulation of /t/ in American English varies according to linguistic and extralinguistic factors. Concerning social factors, word-final /t/ glottalization is seen more among speakers of African American English (Farrington 2018), younger speakers (Partin-Hernandez 2005, Roberts 2006), and women (Byrd 1994, Eddington and Channer 2010). This paper examines the production and perception of /t/ in
-
-
Valuing a Variety of Voices American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 J. Daniel Hasty,Denise Paster,Becky Childs
-
Unlocking the Mystery of Dialect B American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Stuart Davis,Kelly Berkson,Alyssa Strickler
This article addresses incipient/aI/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Acoustic analysis of word list data from 27 participants targets both typical items (e.g., write, writing) and monomorphemic trochaic words often overlooked in previous research (e.g., Nike, bison, cyber, tiger). It reports four major/aI/production patterns in the Fort Wayne data, which range on a continuum from no/aI/-raising to
-
Using Understanding by Design to Build a High School Linguistics Course American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Amy L. Plackowski
-
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the Role of Language in the Yooper Identity American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Nigelle Cochran
-
New Dialect Formation Through Language Contact American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Phillip M. Carter,Lydda López Valdez,Nandi Sims
The situation of sustained contact between Spanish and English in Miami during the past half century provides a rare opportunity to study contact-induced language change in an ecological context in which speakers of the immigrant language (i.e., Spanish) have become the numerical majority. The study reported here is designed to track the phonetic and prosodic influences of Spanish on the variety of
-
The Importance of Rootedness in the Study of Appalachian English American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Paul E. Reed
The relationship of a speaker’s language to their sense of place has been a focus of much of the sociolinguistic literature and dialect studies. However, the use of differing methodologies and measures makes comparison and contrast of the importance of place across different communities and social contexts problematic and drawing overarching conclusions challenging. To resolve this, the current article
-
Lexical complexities in the St. Louis dialect island American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Larry Lafond, Kenneth W. Moffett
The Greater St. Louis “dialect island” poses interesting problems for dialect documentation, partly because Greater St. Louis is a transitional area where many overlapping linguistic influences have left their mark, and also because is an area with new immigrant communities, racial divides, and an aging population.Using a sample from survey and interview data from 815 participants over a seven-year
-
-
Mapping Perceptions of Language Variation in Wisconsin American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2020-02-01 Sarah Braun
This article investigates whether residents of central Wisconsin perceive language variation within their state and, if they do, what it looks like according to them. To achieve these aims, this study examines the perspectives of one central Wisconsin community regarding internal language differentiation within the state. It follows the perceptual dialectology paradigm, based on work by Dennis Preston
-
Local meanings for supra-local change: Perceptions of TRAP backing in Kansas1 American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-12-21 Dan Villarreal,Mary Kohn
While the retraction of TRAP is found throughout the American West (Fridland et al. 2016), it is associated with California and supposed Californian values in both the popular media (Pratt and D’Onofrio 2017) and the ears of Californian listeners (Villarreal 2018). This study investigates the local construction of meaning for a supra-local sound change by examining perceptions of TRAP backing in Kansas
-
Grammatical Reanalysis and the Multiple N-Words in African American English American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-11-01 Taylor Jones,Christopher Hall
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is developing a class of previously undescribed function words, facilitated by the semantic generalization of the word nigga. The authors demonstrate that nigga is unspecified for race, gender, or humanness. They argue that there are multiple n-words, fulfilling different grammatical and social functions. Using a variety of sources, they show that there are
-
-
Has nigga Been Reappropriated as a Term of Endearment? American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-11-01 Hiram L. Smith
It is commonly believed that nigga has been reappropriated as a term of endearment. Perhaps this perception persists incorrectly because public conversations on this word are often dominated by nonlinguists. In contrast, linguists lack comparative studies of nigga’s historical and modern-day use. Addressing this misperception requires a multilayered approach, employed here. This study begins with a
-
-
Favorite Words as a Window onto the Aesthetic Function of Language American Speech (IF 1.0) Pub Date : 2019-08-01 Karla K. McGregor,Timothy Arbisi-Kelm,Bogi Perelmutter,Jacob Oleson
This article characterizes the aesthetic properties of English words. One thousand adult speakers of American English reported their favorite words and justified their selections. Each word was coded for phonological characteristics, valence, and frequency of occurrence and compared with words from a corpus of everyday English from Reader’s Digest. The participants’ stated reasons for their selections