James N. Stanford

A sociotonetic analysis of Sui dialect contact

Sui clan exogamy can serve as a laboratory for investigation of dialect contact and immigration. The Sui people, an indigenous minority of southwest China, have marriage customs requiring that a wife and husband have different clan origins, and the wife permanently immigrates to the husbands village at the time of marriage. Due to subtle interclan dialect variation, a married woman may have different dialect features than her husband and other local villagers. This study presents an acoustic analysis of such clan-level variation in lexical tone, a sociotonetic analysis. Results show that the immigrant women maintain the tone variants of their home clan dialects to a high degree despite spending a decade or more in the husbands village, thus illustrating a case where linguistic identity is maintained in the face of close, long-term contact.

Toward completely automated vowel extraction: Introducing DARLA

Abstract Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is reaching further and further into everyday life with Apple’s Siri, Google voice search, automated telephone information systems, dictation devices, closed captioning, and other applications. Along with such advances in speech technology, sociolinguists have been considering new methods for alignment and vowel formant extraction, including techniques like the Penn Aligner (Yuan and Liberman 2008) and the FAVE automated vowel extraction program (Evanini et al. 2009; Rosenfelder et al. 2011). With humans transcribing audio recordings into sentences, these semi-automated methods can produce effective vowel formant measurements (Labov et al. 2013). But as the quality of ASR improves, sociolinguistics may be on the brink of another transformative technology: large-scale, completely automated vowel extraction without any need for human transcription. It would then be possible to quickly extract vowels from virtually limitless hours of recordings, such as YouTube, publicly available audio/video archives, and large-scale personal interviews or streaming video. How far away is this transformative moment? In this article, we introduce a fully automated program called DARLA (short for “Dartmouth Linguistic Automation,” http://darla.dartmouth.edu), which automatically generates transcriptions with ASR and extracts vowels using FAVE. Users simply upload an audio recording of speech, and DARLA produces vowel plots, a table of vowel formants, and probabilities of the phonetic environments for each token. In this paper, we describe DARLA and explore its sociolinguistic applications. We test the system on a dataset of the US Southern Shift and compare the results with semi-automated methods.

One size fits all? Dialectometry in a small clan-based indigenous society

In many societies, dialectometry has revealed strong correlations between geographic distances and dialect differences (e.g., Gooskens, 2005; Heeringa & Nerbonne, 2001; Nerbonne, 2009, 2010). But what happens when dialectometry is applied to a small, clan-based society such as the indigenous Sui people of rural southwest China? The Sui results show a strong correlation between dialect difference and geographic distance, thus supporting Nerbonne and Kleiwegs (2007) Fundamental Dialectological Postulate. A new culturally specific computation, “rice paddy distance,” also provides a strong correlation with dialect differences. However, the study finds that some dialectometry patterns of larger societies are not “compressible” into small societies such as Sui. Clan exogamy also poses challenges for dialectometry. Nonetheless, the overall results show that basic principles of dialect variation in space can be generalized cross-culturally, even across very different cultures. This paper also suggests a “lower limit” for dialectology, that is, the smallest distance where regional dialectology may be relevant, all other things being equal.

FAREWELL TO THE FOUNDERS: MAJOR DIALECT CHANGES ALONG THE EAST-WEST NEW ENGLAND BORDER

hans Kurath’s 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England reported a significant east-west dialect contrast along the Green mountains of Vermont. In 1987, using data from 1960s fieldwork for the Dictionary of American Regional English, Craig Carver found the contrast remained intact a generation later. Such results reflect the enduring influence of eighteenth-century settlers, known as the Principle of first effective Settlement or the “founder effect.” to determine the current status of the east-west dialect contrast and whether the founder effect is still present, the authors examined 62 speakers along the border in both real and apparent time. the real-time results show that, among older speakers, Kurath’s east-west line of traditional New england features has moved eastward to the state border of New hampshire. the apparenttime results show that many traditional eastern variants are receding among younger speakers, and these linguistic changes are reflecting and constructing significant social changes occurring in this region. for about two centuries, the east-west contrasts of the early european settlements were faithfully transmitted to each new generation. But now, among the current generations of speakers, the founder effect in northern New england is rapidly dissipating. The Vermont–New Hampshire border region is steeped in traditional cultural contrasts that reflect early european settlement patterns. this eastwest border is a socially meaningful place ( johnstone 2004), and in local lore, “the air itself changes upon crossing the Connecticut river [state border]” (Wooster 1998, 2). Dialect features play a role in New hampshire and Vermont state identities, and folk linguistic knowledge of these traditional dialect contrasts can appear in unexpected places. In a sandwich shop menu from a small town near the state border, the “New hampsha’” sandwich has a nonrhotic spelling while the “Vermonter” sandwich is rhotic (figure 1). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/87/2/126/230221/ASp87.2E.2StanfordEtal.pdf by guest on 08 July 2019 Farewell to the Founders 127 What is the current status of the traditional east-west dialect contrast of northern New england? the original motivation for our research in this region grew out of the authors’ personal experiences along the Vermont–New hampshire border. In daily neighborhood life on the New hampshire side of the border, we commonly hear older speakers using traditional eastern New england dialect features, such as fronted father vowels and lack of postvocalic-r, among others. Notably, however, local neighborhood children and young adults do not seem to produce the traditional eastern New england features. these everyday occurrences go relatively unnoticed at the conscious level. yet such observations should give sociolinguists pause for thought: Is there a generational change in progress? What is happening along this borderland of various socially meaningful places and generations? on the Vermont side of the border, one of our coauthors, thomas leddy-Cecere, has experienced a similar sense of generational change. Born and raised in a small rural town near the Vermont–New hampshire border, leddy-Cecere observes that his generation of young adults does not retain many of the east-west contrasts found among the older generations. Such impressions call for new empirical investigations in this border region. figure 1 from the Bagel Basement menu in hanover, New hampshire, near the New hampshire–Vermont State Border Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/87/2/126/230221/ASp87.2E.2StanfordEtal.pdf by guest on 08 July 2019 american speech 87.2 (2012) 128 labov, Ash and Boberg’s (2006) landmark examination of North American dialect patterns, The Atlas of North American English (ANAE), discusses the “enduring influence of the original regional patterns” of the early englishspeaking settlers (303). Such patterns include a sharp distinction between eastern and western New england: a key line of east-west dialect contrast observed with 1930s fieldwork and confirmed with 1960s fieldwork (Kurath 1939; Carver 1987). Are the east-west distinctions of northern New england still present or are they dissipating? Is transmission (labov 2007) faithfully continuing from the time of the early european settlements to the present? What is the current status of the founder effect in this region? to answer these questions, we designed our fieldwork along two complementary dimensions: a real-time study and an apparent-time study. the realtime component consisted of fieldwork at senior citizen lunches in different locations around the region, enabling us to compare our 2010 results with the dialect geography of the 1931–33 fieldwork of the Linguistic Atlas of New England (Kurath 1939), a time depth of about 77 years. In the apparent-time component, we held geography constant and examined age differences: interviews were conducted with two different age groups in a single town on the east side of the east-west border, Claremont, New hampshire. this community has older speakers who continue to use traditional eastern New england variants, even as younger generations are changing. We therefore provide new localized information about the border of two major U.S. dialects, a rural region not sampled by ANAE. We find clear evidence of significant changes in both the real-time and apparent-time dimensions of the study, and we also examine sociohistorical reasons behind these ongoing changes. After so many generations of consistent transmission tracing back to the founders, the social patterns laid down by the founders are now rapidly shifting and dissipating in the current generations.

The influence of Mandarin Chinese on minority languages in rural southwest China: a sociolinguistic study of tones in contact

Abstract Language change is often traced to language contact, but the specific sociolinguistic processes are not fully understood. This article reports on our field research of contact between Chinese and two minority languages in rural southwest China: Sui and Qiang. The study shows how lexical tone, an underrepresented variable in sociolinguistics, can be valuable as an empirical measure of language contact and change. Furthermore, we find that it is the same Chinese tone, a high tone in Southwest Mandarin, which is affecting the phonologies of both of these disparate minority languages. We use a social constructionist approach to model these changes: the “Structure” of a language is dialectically constructed by individual moments of speech — “Events” — which are in turn influenced by Structure. From this perspective, each individual use of a high-tone Chinese word is constructing and changing Sui and Qiang. Tone therefore provides an audible gauge of cross-cultural contact, reflecting and constructing the rapidly changing sociolinguistic landscape of rural southwest China.

‘The rez accent knows no borders’: Native American ethnic identity expressed through English prosody

In many Native American and Canadian First Nations communities, indigenous languages are important for the linguistic construction of ethnic identity. But because many younger speakers have limited access to their heritage languages, English may have an even more important role in identity construction than Native languages do. Prior literature shows distinctive local English features in particular tribes. Our study builds on this knowledge but takes a wider perspective: We hypothesize that certain features are shared across much larger distances, particularly prosody. Native cultural insiders (the first two co-authors) had a central role in this project. Our recordings of seventy-five speakers in three deliberately diverse locations (Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, North/South Dakota; Northwest Territories, Canada; and diverse tribes represented at Dartmouth College) show that speakers are heteroglossically performing prosodic features to index Native ethnic identity. They have taken a ‘foreign’ language (English) and enregistered these prosodic features, creatively producing and reproducing a shared ethnic identity across great distances. (Native Americans, prosody, ethnicity, ethnic identity, English, dialects) *

A Web Application for Automated Dialect Analysis

Sociolinguists are regularly faced with the task of measuring phonetic features from speech, which involves manually transcribing audio recordings ‐ a major bottleneck to analyzing large collections of data. We harness automatic speech recognition to build an online end-to-end web application where users upload untranscribed speech collections and receive formant measurements of the vowels in their data. We demonstrate this tool by using it to automatically analyze President Barack Obama’s vowel pronunciations.

Multiple vectors of unidirectional dialect change in eastern New England

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 Sankoffs (2013a) notion of “age vectors” and Labovs (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.