Valerie Fridland

The social and linguistic conditioning of back vowel fronting across ethnic groups in Memphis, Tennessee

While a number of recent studies have documented the back vowel changes affecting White varieties nationally, few studies have examined back vowel fronting in non-Anglo dialects or compared the social and linguistic commonalties and contrasts in the progress of the shift and the vowel classes affected. The present study explores how ethnic and regional alignment affects the dispersion of fronting in three key back vowel classes, the BOOT , BOOK , and BOAT classes. Using instrumental acoustic measurement of relevant vowel classes, this article will examine both the social and linguistic conditioning governing the fronting of these classes in White and Black speakers in Memphis, TN, looking at these results in light of those found by Anderson, Milroy & Nguyen (2002), Ash (1996), and Labov (1994) elsewhere in the US.

The Social Dimension of the Southern Vowel Shift: Gender, Age, and Class.

The three most broadly recognized dialect areas of American Regional English are currently being re-defined by, in some cases, sweeping changes that alter the way vowels are being pronounced in the South, North and West. While research into the changes in urban Northern dialects has contributed a fairly broad picture of both the phonetic and social character of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), the changes affecting the Southern region of the U.S. have received less attention, particularly in terms of social distribution and dissemination. This paper seeks to address the question of how successfully changes in the high and mid front and back vowels in the South are being disseminated throughout a local urban community and how these changes fit in with changes occurring in other American dialects. In addition, the paper weighs the attraction to local or national norms in determining the success and diffusion of each of the shifts relative to the social environment in which they are developing and attempts to relate the local social embedding of the shifts to their meaning in the larger national context.

Network Strength and the Realization of the Southern Vowel Shift among African Americans in Memphis, Tennessee

�� Studies on American dialects have questioned whether contemporary black and white speech is increasingly converging or diverging and what this indicates about American speech communities. In the face of speakers’ overwhelming access to a larger national community, recent phonetic studies on the vowel shifts occurring in the United States point to a complex array of trends in the direction of vowel movements (Feagin 1986; Eckert 1988, 2000; Labov 1991, 1994; Clarke, Elms, and Youssef 1995; Gordon 1997; Anderson and Milroy 1999; Fridland 2000, 2001). White speakers in the urban North, particularly in the Great Lakes region, appear to be participating in a series of vowel shifts, labeled the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), striking particularly for the increasing differentiation of these speakers from those in other regions of the United States. Even more striking is the lack of participation in the incoming changes by African American speakers in the North. Whether Northern black communities are participating in a different set of vowel changes that may be drawing them closer to African American communities elsewhere remains an open question. Moreover, researchers working on Southern American dialects (Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner 1972; Feagin 1986; Labov 1991, 1994; Bailey 1997; Thomas 1997a, 1997b, 2001; Fridland 2000, 2001) have also noted a series of what appear to be distinguishing vowel shifts occurring in white Southern speech, referred to as the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS). Little is known about the ethnic distribution of the SVS, but preliminary work (Thomas 1997b; Bailey and Thomas 1998; Thomas and Bailey 1998) suggests the Southern African American community may not be participating in changes affecting white speech in the South. A lack of involvement by African Americans in the major sound changes in American dialects adds significantly to a national dialect picture of increasing divergence in

Tie, Tied and Tight: The Expansion of /ai/ Monophthongization in African-American and European-American Speech in Memphis, Tennessee.

This paper explores the distribution of /ai/ monophthongization in African-American and European-American speakers in Memphis, Tennessee. While often considered a feature characteristic of White Southern speech, /ai/ monophthongization has also been recorded in Black speech, both within and outside the South. However, expansion of glide-weakening to the less common pre-voiceless contexts has been considered unique to European-American dialects. Evidence of extensive glide-weakening in the African-American community in Memphis will be presented and compared to the degree and contexts of glide-weakening in the European-American community. The results will show that not only is /ai/ monophthongization a feature of Memphis speech generally, regardless of ethnicity, but that African-Americans in fact lead in glide-weakening in all contexts. The role of Southern identity in the expansion of /ai/ monophthongization is discussed as a critical component in the selection of features in both Black and White speech in the Memphis area.

PATTERNS OF /Uw/, /ʊ/, AND /Ow FRONTING IN Reno, NEVADA

The phenomenon of back vowel fronting is a sweeping change affecting U.S. dialects. The apparent uniformity of these changes compared to those affecting front vowel classes in regional dialects is one of its most striking aspects. While this fronting, affecting the /uw/, /u/, and /ow/ vowel classes, has been noted by almost every researcher investigating regional vowel variation, the linguistic and social aspects of this shift in the Western region has only recently begun to be explored. As part of a larger research program exploring the diffusion of back vowel fronting across regional dialects and its related linguistic and social conditioning, this paper will help fill a void in the study of back vowel fronting in the Western United States, as realized in Reno, Nevada.

Variation in perception and production of mid front vowels in the U.S. Southern Vowel Shift

Abstract Looking at speech perception from a sociolinguistic perspective, the paper first explores how speakers from three different regions in the U.S. perform on a vowel identification task for a continuum between /e/ and /ɛ/. Following the general analysis of cross-regional perception, we turn our focus to a subsample of Southern participants who also provided speech data, investigating the nature of the link between their speech production and perception for these vowels. In particular, we are interested in the extent to which participation in a series of shifts affecting the Southern speech region in production (the Southern Vowel Shift or SVS) affects perception in that region. The data includes a set of seven siblings and we also examine whether sibling status affects perceptual variability. Our results suggest that region does play a significant role in mediating perception, particularly in the South, and that SVS participation in production is related to differences in perception within that region, suggesting that both individual and community based norms are crucial in speech processing. Finally, identifying a large amount of familial variability in both perception and production, we find that siblinghood does not seem to play a greater role in speech perception similarity than shift participation.

Durational and spectral differences in American English vowels: Dialect variation within and across regions

Spectral differences among varieties of American English have been widely studied, typically recognizing three major regionally diagnostic vowel shift patterns [Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (De Gruyter, Berlin)]. Durational variability across dialects, on the other hand, has received relatively little attention. This paper investigates to what extent regional differences in vowel duration are linked with spectral changes taking place in the Northern, Western, and Southern regions of the U.S. Using F1/F2 and duration measures, the durational correlates of the low back vowel merger, characteristic of Western dialects, and the acoustic reversals of the front tense/lax vowels, characteristic of Southern dialects, are investigated. Results point to a positive correlation between spectral overlap and vowel duration for Northern and Western speakers, suggesting that both F1/F2 measures and durational measures are used for disambiguation of vowel quality. The findings also indicate that, regardless of region, a durational distinction maintains the contrast between the low back vowel classes, particularly in cases of spectral merger. Surprisingly, Southerners show a negative correlation for the vowel shifts most defining of contemporary Southern speech, suggesting that neither spectral position nor durational measures are the most relevant cues for vowel quality in the South.

Rebel Vowels: How Vowel Shift Patterns are Reshaping Speech in the Modern South

This article discusses the main reflexes of contemporary vowel changes in the South. In particular, the current state of knowledge about the Southern Vowel Shift and back vowel fronting is explored. This paper will discuss how these vowel patterns contribute to speech in a modern South, one asserting the region’s unique heritage while at the same time proclaiming its increasingly metropolitan and diverse status in the American landscape, and discuss the implications of this modernity.

MAKING SENSE OF VARIATION: PLEASANTNESS AND EDUCATION RATINGS OF SOUTHERN VOWEL VARIANTS

An earlier study (Fridland, Bartlett, and Kreuz 2004) showed that listeners in Memphis, Tennessee, judged more perceptually salient those vowel shifts that the local dialect used as opposed to vowel shifts that Memphis had in common with other U.S. dialects. This study examines the perceptions of 209 natives of Memphis in two tasks: recognizing vowels as Southern and rating a range of synthetized variants of ey, e, uw, and ow for level of education and sounding pleasant. In the first part, participants were successful in recognizing vowel variants as Southern. In the second, they discerned slight phonetic shifts and assigned lower ratings for education and pleasantness to those vowel variants that they recognizes as most Southern. The results add support to the evidence that perceptual judgments of speech depend on both linguistic and social information

Regional relationships among the low vowels of U.S. English: Evidence from production and perception

The unconditioned merger of the low back vowels and the variety of realizations found for the low front vowel have been noted as leading to greater distinctiveness across U.S. English regional dialects. The extent to which the movements of these vowels are related has repeatedly been of interest to dialectology as well as phonological theory. Here, examining production and perception data from speaker-listeners across three major regions of the United States, the relationships among these low vowels within and across regions are investigated. Participants provided speech samples and took part in a vowel identification task, judging vowels along a continuum from /ae/ to /ɑ/. Results of acoustic analysis and statistical analysis of the perception results indicate that a structural relationship between /ae/ and /ɑ/ is maintained across regions and that listeners’ own degree of low back vowel merger predicts their perception of the boundary between /ae/ and /ɑ/.