The numerous controversies surrounding African American Vernacular English can be illuminated by data from phonological and phonetic variables. However, what is known about different variables varies greatly, with consonantal variables receiving the most scholarly attention, followed by vowel quality, prosody, and finally voice quality. Variables within each domain are discussed here and what has been learned about their realizations in African American speech is compiled. The degree of variation of each variable within African American speech is also summarized when it is known. Areas for which more work is needed are noted.

A review of speech identi¢cation studies examining the abilities of listeners to distinguish African American and European American voices shows that Americans can recognize many African American voices with a high degree of accuracy even in the absence of stereotypical morphosyntactic and lexical features. Experiments to determine what cues listeners use to distinguish ethnicity have not yielded such consistent results, perhaps suggesting that listeners may access a wide variety of cues if necessary. An experiment involving African Americans with features of a European American vernacular demonstrated that African Americans with atypical features are di⁄cult for listeners to identify. Analysis suggested that vowel quality and intonation could have misled respondents but did not rule out timing and voice quality as factors in identi¢cation.

Prosodic rhythm was measured for a sample of 20 African American and 20 European American speakers from North Carolina using the metric devised by Low, Grabe and Nolan (2000), which involves comparisons of the durations of vowels in adjacent syllables. In order to gain historical perspective, the same technique was applied to the ex-slave recordings described in Bailey, Maynor and Cukor-Avila (1991) and to recordings of five Southern European Americans born before the Civil War. In addition, Jamaicans, Hispanics of Mexican origin who spoke English as their L2, and Hispanics speaking Spanish served as control groups. Results showed that the North Carolina African Americans and European Americans were both quite stress-timed overall, with no significant difference between them. Spanish emerged as solidly syllable-timed, while Jamaican English and Hispanic English were intermediate. The ex-slaves were significantly less stress-timed than either younger African Americans or European Americans born before the Civil War. This finding suggests that African American English was once similar to Jamaican English in prosodic rhythm.

No abstract

The migration of people to the Sunbelt in the United States constitutes a major demographic shift, but has received little attention from language variationists. In Texas, this migration has led to a split of the Anglo population of the state into two dialects, a rural dialect and a metropolitan dialect. Evidence from a random-sample survey of Texas and from a systematic set of surveys of high schools in the state shows that young rural Anglos preserve two stereotypical features of the Texas accent, monophthongal /ai/, as in night, and lowered onsets of/e/, as in day, while young Anglos from metropolitan centers lack these features. This difference, which is absent among middle-aged and older native Texan Anglos, appears to have resulted from the fact that in-migration from other parts of the country is concentrated in metropolitan centers, especially suburbs. I wish to thank Guy Bailey for providing me with the raw data from the Texas Poll and the recordings from the high school surveys on which this study is based. Collection of the Texas Poll data was supported by National Science Foundation grant BNS-8812552.1 also wish to thank Walt Wolfram, Guy Bailey, and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors, of course, are my own. 309 310 ERIK R. THOMAS