Keywords

century-scale phonetic shift, statewide speaker dataset, vowel dynamics and trajectories, multi-generation acoustic corpus, relative vowel system reorganization, movement toward North American urban patterns

Abstract

”How has American English speech changed in Georgia, over the last 100 years?”

Big, detailed phone/c datasets
Vowel dynamics
Speakers from all over Georgia
Speakers born 1887 – 1998

Traditional descriptions of English vowel systems focus on single-point x,y coordinates. The relative placement of vowels indicates a speaker’s shift, or vowel system

How has Georgia English changed since the 1890s? All vowels have changed, in relative position and trajectory shape.

What is the direction of that change? In the same direction as many other urban areas in North America.

Original Publication Citation

Joseph A. Stanley & Margaret E. L. Renwick. “100 Years of Georgia English.” New Ways of Analyzing Variation 49. Online. October 19–24, 2021.