Keywords

race and age vowel variation, Southern vowel shift dynamics, front-diphthong /eɪ ɛ/ changes

Abstract

Conclusions

Vowels’ acoustics vary by race, sex and age:

European American speakers have greater /eɪ ɛ/ swapping than African Americans, supporting Thomas’ (2007) characterization of the African American Vowel Shift
Women have a more diphthongal realization of front /ɛ æ/ than men

Active divergence of Southern speech from other varieties:

In this historical dataset, younger speakers lead Southern shifting: they have more “swapping” of /i ɪ/and /eɪ ɛ/, more back-vowel fronting, and more dynamic /æ/ and /ɔ/ vowels
Older speakers are more conservative both in vowels’ relative positioning, and their dynamics

/eɪ ɛ/ are the nexus of shifting in DASS

These vowels vary across sexes, races and age groups, in their relative positions and dynamics
Younger, European American women have the “most Southern” treatment of /eɪ ɛ/

Methodological variety reveals Southern vowel shifting

Neither static nor dynamic measures alone capture all these sources of significant variation

Original Publication Citation

Joseph A. Stanley & Margaret E. L. Renwick. “Social factors in Southern US speech: Acoustic analysis of a large-scale legacy corpus.” Poster presentation at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. New York City, NY. January 3–6, 2019.