On Negotiating Racial and Regional Identities: Vocalic Variation Among African Americans in Bakersfield, California

This paper investigates the linguistic construction of ethnic and regional identities through the use of a local feature, BAT retraction and lowering (D’Onofrio 2015, Kennedy and Grama 2012, Podesva, D’Onofrio, Van Hofwegen and Kim 2015). Analysis of the speech of twelve African Americans from Bakersfield, California, shows an apparent change over time, such that younger African Americans produce backer tokens. Additionally, a targeted analysis of a single speaker suggests that African Americans’ degree of retraction can index local-based stances and affiliations. Because of BAT retraction’s indexing of coastal urban identity (Kennedy and Grama 2012) and the valley girl character-type (D’Onofrio 2015), the recruitment of this linguistic resource among African Americans opens up a larger discussion on who owns the local sound change

Intersections between Race, Place, and Gender in the Production of /s/

Articulation of /s/ has been linked with gender identity in both production (e.g., Podesva and Van Hofwegen 2016, Hazenberg 2012) and perception studies (e.g., Strand 1999), with women producing a fronter /s/ than men, and a fronter /s/ being perceptually linked with femininity. However, this research has been conducted in largely white speech communities, and it remains an open question whether the same gendered patterns exist among African-American communities. We explore /s/ variation in two African-American (AA) communities: Rochester, NY, an urban community in which AAs form a significant portion of the population; and Bakersfield, CA, a non-urban community in which AAs form a small minority. Statistical analyses reveal no gender difference in /s/ articulation among Bakersfield AAs, with men being just as fronted as women. However, a gender pattern exists among Rochester AAs, with women being significantly more fronted than men. These results suggest that patterns linking phonetic variables to gender identities are specific to the communities under analysis, and may be influenced not only by speaker gender, but also by speaker race and geographic location. These patterns illuminate the importance of taking into account multiple intersecting dimensions of identity in studies of phonetic variation, as broad trends established for one group of speakers may not account for the complexity of how speakers of different demographic groups in different regions phonetically articulate gender identity

Dialect on Trial: Raciolinguistic ideologies in perceptions of AAVE and MAE codeswitching

It is known that listeners map speakers’ voices to racial categories and that such identification can have harmful social, political, and economic consequences for African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers (Baugh 2003, Grogger 2009, Rickford and King 2016). While this work has focused on the production of linguistic cues used to perceive speakers’ race, recent research on the white listening subject (Flores and Rosa 2015) has advocated investigating listeners’ raciolinguistic ideologies, regardless of whether speakers command standardized or stigmatized varieties (Rosa and Flores 2017). This paper explores social perceptions of a bidialectal African American speaker when he uses African American Vernacular English (AAVE) compared to Mainstream American English (MAE). The speaker, a 32-year-old African American professor from California, recorded AAVE and MAE versions of a (2 minute) passage accounting his weekend activities, made to resemble an alibi in a criminal justice proceeding. Utilizing a matched-guise design, 116 undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to hear the account spoken in either AAVE or MAE, without background information about the speaker. A majority of participants identified the speaker as Black, as having less than a college degree, and as coming from a lower/working-class background, though listeners hearing the AAVE guise were more likely to perceive the speaker as Black and less educated than those in the MAE guise. Further, participants in the AAVE condition perceived the speaker as more likely to be involved in a gang compared to the MAE condition. That the speaker’s codeswitching resulted in racialized differences in some ratings (e.g., race, education, gang status), but not in others (e.g., class, credibility, trustworthiness) raises questions about whether codeswitching can ameliorate the well-established consequences of anti-Black stereotypes for AAVE speakers. Regardless of the presence or absence of AAVE features, ideologies attached to Black voices can still yield associations with legible Black tropes

Social Influences on the Degree of Stop Voicing in Inland California

This paper examines social influences on the realization of voiced stops in inland California. We analyzed sociolinguistic interviews with 62 white residents from Redding, Merced, and Bakersfield (which mark the northern, middle, and southern points of California’s Central Valley), balanced for sex, class, age, and whether a speaker earns their livelihood off the land. We follow Jaciewicz, Fox, and Lyle (2009) in examining the extent of voicing during stop closures (duration of voicing during closure relative to total duration of closure), and also adopt a novel measure of the magnitude of voicing, which captures the intensity of a stop closure relative to the following vowel. Mixed effects linear regression models were constructed for both voicing measures, with a number of linguistic and social predictors considered in addition to random effects. Results show that the extent of voicing measure was insufficiently sensitive to differentiate speakers, as nearly everyone exhibited voicing throughout the closure. The voicing intensity measure, however, was shown to reveal significant effects of place of articulation, closure duration, and ties to the land. Most importantly, speakers who earn their livelihood off the land exhibit significantly stronger voiced stops than those who do not. We argue that even though strongly voiced stops likely entered California during a large-scale in-migration of Southerners during the Dust Bowl (Jaciewicz et al. 2009 report more extensive voicing among women from the South compared to the Midwest), they have since taken on locally significant indexicalities reflecting the values and ideals of land-oriented communities throughout the Central Valley (and do not simply mean “Southern”). Our findings also raise questions about where the linguistic limits of socially structured variation lie, given the systematic social patterning observed here for low-level phonetic details (i.e., voicing intensity) that likely operate far below the level of consciousness

Utilizing Supplementary Video Material to Enhance Classroom Confidence in LIN 220

poster, CAS352/LIN 220, workshop leaders spring 201