Retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift in Raleigh, NC: Social Factors

New automated methods for large-scale acoustic analysis bring expanded opportunities for investigating social factors influencing variation and change in vowel systems. This paper explores social factors in a 108-speaker subset of a 250-speaker conversational corpus from Raleigh, North Carolina, where the community has shifted in nearly uniform fashion from a Southern vowel system to an aregional standard system. Age, occupation, parents\u27 occupation, sex, and neighborhood are evaluated using linear mixed-effects models, with Z2-Z1 for each of the 5 front vowels as a separate dependent variable. While there are some significant occupational effects, year of birth is the strongest and most consistent social factor, indicating considerable uniformity during the course of change. Adding more speakers from the corpus will facilitate the use of other socioeconomic variables such as education level as well as finer-grained occupation variables, which may provide insight as to the mechanisms by which professional speakers lead the shift

Network Embeddedness and the Retreat from Southern Vowels in Raleigh

This paper introduces the social network procedure of cohesive blocking (Moody & White 2003) as a strategy for fine-grained quantitative network analysis in sociolinguistics. In Raleigh, North Carolina, the Southern Vowel Shift is reversing, due in part to large-scale migration from outside the South since the mid-20th century. Acoustic analysis of the five front vowels from a 140-speaker subset of the conversational Raleigh corpus reveals steady change across apparent time. The community\u27s network structure is considered via a bipartite, or two-mode, network of schools and individuals. Cohesive blocking generates a network hierarchy in which individuals are nested at different levels. Nestedness is then tested as a predictor of linguistic variation in linear mixed effects models, which reveal significant nestedness effects for three of the five vowels, net of age, sex, and occupation. Speakers with higher nestedness lead the retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift

Towards a Sociologically-Grounded View of Occupation in Sociolinguistics

In order to improve our operationalization of class in sociolinguistic analysis, this paper draws on sociological theory as the foundation for a new approach to the conception and coding of occupation. The 162-speaker dataset is drawn from the larger corpus of sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Raleigh, NC. F1 and F2 measurements for the five front vowels of the SVS were extracted at 25% vowel duration and Lobanov-normalized (1971), and the vowel diagonal (Z2-Z1) was included as the dependent variable in regression analyses. To operationalize a sociologically-based theory of occupations, we implement a five-way distinction between industrial/occupational sectors (Law and Government, Technology and Finance, Interactive Service Work, Care Work, and Blue Collar) based on historical changes in Raleigh’s economy. Net of social and linguistic controls, models show significant differences between groups formerly grouped together as White Collar occupations, attributable to historical embeddedness in the greater Raleigh area

Attribute Networking: A Sociolinguistic Technique for Modeling Subjective Social Space

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Network Characteristics of American Raising

The raising of the nucleus of /aɪ/ before voiceless consonants, as in write but not ride, has been observed in many North American English varieties (Davis et al. 2019, Fruehwald 2016, Joos 1942, Strelluf 2018). Its emergence appears to be phonetically motivated in some cases rather than the result of diffusion between communities (Chambers 1989, Thomas & Moreton 2008). Recent evidence from geographically diverse communities within the U.S. suggests that /aɪ/ raising is a new supra-regional sound change (Davis, et al. 2019; Strelluf 2018; Davis & Berkson 2019). The widespread and recent emergence of /aɪ/ raising offers the opportunity to study the social network characteristics of early adopters. This analysis compares the social distributions of /aɪ/ raising in two different social settings. The first is Raleigh, North Carolina, an urban setting in the Southeast, and the second is small-town Kansas as represented by suburban communities and rural agricultural communities located in the Great Plains region of the US. Both communities show evidence of this sound change, with a female lead. In Raleigh, network position is correlated with the loss of salient Southern vocalic features including /aɪ/ monophthongization, but /aɪ/ raising does not follow the same pattern. While network brokers or those with many weak ties are often assumed to lead sound changes, individual-level evidence from both Kansas and Raleigh is mixed with regard to whether network characteristics are correlated with /aɪ/ raising. These findings indicate that we still do not know the network factors facilitating the adoption and spread of supra-regional linguistic innovations

Gradience, Allophony, and the Southern Shift Trigger

Monophthongization is thus the triggering event (Labov 1994) for the chain shift. Monophthongization is overall disfavored before voiceless consonants; but the specific relationship between pre-voiced (PRIZE) and pre-voiceless (PRICE) differs in different parts of the South (Fridland 2003, Thomas 2001). A modular feedforward architecture of phonology (cf. Bermúdez-Otero 2014, Fruehwald 2013) distinguishes phonetically and phonologically controlled patterns: • Phonological rules manipulate discrete, categorical phonological entities. • Outputs of phonological rules are still represented as discrete structural entities. • Phonetic implementation rules map these to concrete physical articulations. • Phonetic rules operate gradiently over continuous phonetic space. A vowel chain shift is a change in phonetic implementation; this means the entities involved need not be phonemes per se, but any discrete phonological segment, potentially an allophone of another phoneme (Dinkin 2011). This implies… • if the Southern Shift is a pull-chain as described… • and if the modular feedforward account of chain shifts is correct… • then the relationship between PRICE and PRIZE must have originally been gradient— a continuum from more diphthongal to more monophthongal. If the shift had originated with distinct diphthongal and monophthongal allophones, the original /ay / position would still be occupied, not leaving space for /ey / to lower. So: Was Southern /ay/-monophthongization a phonetically gradient process

Age Vectors vs. Axes of Intraspeaker Variation in Vowel Formants Measured Automatically From Several English Speech Corpora

To test the hypothesis that intraspeaker variation in vowel formants is related to the direction of diachronic change, we compare the direction of change in apparent time with the axis of intraspeaker variation in F1 and F2 for vowel phonemes in several corpora of North American and Scottish English. These vowels were measured automatically with a scheme (tested on hand-measured vowels) that considers the frequency, bandwidth, and amplitude of the first three formants in reference to a prototype. In the corpus data, we find that the axis of intraspeaker variation is typically aligned vertically, presumably corresponding to the degree of jaw opening for individual tokens, but for the North American GOOSE vowel, the axis of intraspeaker variation is aligned with the (horizontal) axis of diachronic change for this vowel across North America. This may help to explain why fronting and unrounding of high back vowels are common shifts across languages

The future of dialects: Selected papers from Methods in Dialectology XV

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada