A Comparison of Turn-of-the-Century and Turn-of-the-Millennium Speech in Georgia
Keywords
Elsewhere shift, speech, Georgia, contemporary speech
Abstract
The Elsewhere Shift, defined here as the lowering and retraction of the front lax vowels, is a now-widespread phenomenon in North American English. However, few studies document its presence in the South. This study analyzes speech from two corpora of Georgians, one representing contemporary speech and another representing language from a century ago, to demonstrate the presence of the Elsewhere Shift in the South. Generalized additive mixed-effects models fit to formant measurements extracted from these corpora suggest a recession of traditional Southern dialect features (glide-weakening in PRICE, the Southern Vowel Shift) and the adoption of the Elsewhere Shift (the low black merger, retracted front lax vowels), both in relative position in the F1-F2 space as well as formant trajectory shape. In addition to providing the first real-time analysis of English in Urban Georgia, this confirms the Elsewhere Shift's Status as a pan-North America dialect feature.
Original Publication Citation
Joseph A. Stanley. “A comparison of turn-of-the-century and turn-of-the-millennium speech in Georgia.” (2022) Proceedings of the 6th Annual Linguistics Conference at UGA.
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Stanley, Joseph A., "A Comparison of Turn-of-the-Century and Turn-of-the-Millennium Speech in Georgia" (2019). Faculty Publications. 6142.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/6142
Document Type
Conference Paper
Publication Date
2019
Permanent URL
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/8871
Publisher
University of Georgia
Language
English
College
Humanities
Department
Linguistics
Copyright Use Information
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