Maciej Baranowski

The fronting of the back upgliding vowels in Charleston, South Carolina

In a radical reorganization of its sound system, Charleston has lost most of the distinctive features of the traditional dialect, including monophthongal and ingliding /ey/ ( face ) and /ow/ ( goat ). The traditionally back nucleus of /ow/ is now further to the front in Charleston than it is in most other dialects of American English. The fronting is led by the highest-status social group and appears not to conform to the generalization of the curvilinear principle, whereby an intermediately located social group leads linguistic change from below. It is argued that the fronting is not internally motivated, but rather it is being introduced into the dialect as a systematic borrowing. It is a change from above and as such does not bear on the curvilinear principle.

Class matters: the sociolinguistics of GOOSE and GOAT in Manchester English

This paper reports on patterns of sociolinguistic variation and change in Manchesters goose and goat vowels on the basis of the acoustic analysis of 122 speakers, stratified by age, gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. Goose fronting is an internal change showing little social differentiation, except before /l/ as in school and pool , where, in contrast to most other dialects of English, goose shows advanced fronting inversely correlated with socioeconomic status. Goat fronting, on the other hand, is a change brought from outside the dialect by the highest status groups, displaying a pattern of monotonic social stratification, a female lead, and a strong effect of ethnicity. The role of attitudes toward the community in the realization of the vowels is compared with the effect of social class construed in terms of distances between social groups. Social class turns out to be a better predictor, suggesting that the role of attitudes and identity may be overestimated in research eschewing a systematic exploration of social class at the same time.