Postvocalic /r/ in New Orleans: Language, place and commodification

From silva dimes to po-boys, r-lessness has long been a conspicuous feature of all dialects of New Orleans English. This dissertation presents a quantitative and qualitative description of current rates of r-lessness in the city. 71 speakers from 21 neighborhoods were interviewed. R-pronunciation was elicited in four contexts: interview chat, Katrina narratives, a reading passage and a word list. R-lessness was found in 39% of possible instances. Older speakers pronounce /-r/ less than younger speakers, and those with a high school education or less pronounce /-r/ far less than those with post-secondary education. Race and gender did not prove to be significant predictors of r-pronunciation. In contrast to past studies, many speakers in the current study discuss their metalinguistic awareness of /-r/ and their partial control of /-r/ variation, discussing switching between r-fulness and r-lessness in different contexts. In New Orleans, this metalinguistic awareness is attributable in part to the devastation following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the near-disappearance of the city intensified an already extant nostalgia for local culture, including ways of speaking. Nostalgia and amplification by advertisers and popular media have helped recontextualize r-lessness as a variable associated with a number of social meanings, including localness and authenticity. These processes help transform r-lessness, for many speakers, from a routine feature of talk to a floating cultural variable, serving as a semiotic resource on which speakers can draw on to perform localness. This dissertation both closes a gap in research on New Orleans speech and uses New Orleans as a case study to suggest that the social meanings of linguistic features are created and maintained in part by a constellation of interrelated social processes of late modernity. Further, I argue that individual speakers are increasingly agentively engaged with these larger processes, as part of a global transformation from more traditional, place-bound populations to more deracinated individuals who choose to align themselves with particular communities and local cultural forms, particularly those that have been commodified

Ya Heard Me? Rhoticity in Post-Katrina New Orleans English

Sociolinguistic research has documented the change to rhoticity by white speakers in the American South, and the increase in rhoticity in New York City and New England. However, there has been scant investigation of rhoticity in New Orleans, Louisiana, which, as a linguistic island in the Gulf South argued to have strong historical ties to New York City, presents a particularly interesting site for investigation. The city's varieties of English have historically been nonrhotic, and this study investigates whether New Orleans remains marginal to the now-rhotic white South and whether it shares New York City patterns in /r/ realization. Apparent-time evidence suggests that the advancement of rhoticity has been slower than in both the South and New York. Younger people in the sample heavily favor rhoticity in formal reading passage speech style, but not in the less formal interview style, where age is not a significant predictor. Greater educational attainment and external cultural orientation are strongly predictive of rhoticity across speech styles. The continued presence of variability in /r/ realization across age, gender, and ethnoracial categories suggests that New Orleans's linguistic distinctiveness remains considerable.</jats:p

New Orleans bounce music, sexuality, and affect

Abstract This article explores how language, sexuality, and affect are circuited in New Orleans bounce music. Bounce features lyrics that characterize the performers as queer, describe sex explicitly, celebrate sex between male-bodied people, and expose the hypocrisy of straight-acting men. Bounce lyrics are just one element of bounce performances, however, which consist of the reciprocal relationship between the dancers in the audience, the intensity of the MC’s exhortations, and the rhythm of the backing musical track. Bounce performances create a fleeting community of artists, bodies and music that is less about the expression of discrete sociodemographic categories, and more about a collective affective event. Using ideas of relationality from queer and affect theory, and Stallybrass and White’s “high/low” cultural hierarchies, this article shows how bounce challenges normative ideas about the autonomous ‘speaking subject,’ and supports a messier understanding of the self as affectively relational.</jats:p