The three most broadly recognized dialect areas of American Regional English are currently being re-de®ned by, in some cases, sweeping changes that alter the way vowels are being pronounced in the South, North and West. While research into the changes in urban Northern dialects has contributed a fairly broad picture of both the phonetic and social character of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), the changes aecting the Southern region of the U.S. have received less attention, particularly in terms of social distribution and dissemination. This paper seeks to address the question of how successfully changes in the high and mid front and back vowels in the South are being disseminated throughout a local urban community and how these changes ®t in with changes occurring in other American dialects. In addition, the paper weighs the attraction to local or national norms in determining the success and diusion of each of the shifts relative to the social environment in which they are developing and attempts to relate the local social embedding of the shifts to their meaning in the larger national context.
Do you hear what I hear? Experimental measurement of the perceptual salience of acoustically manipulated vowel variants by Southern speakers in Memphis, TNVa l e r i e F r i d l a n d a n d K a t h r y n B a r
While a number of recent studies have documented the back vowel changes affecting White varieties nationally, few studies have examined back vowel fronting in non-Anglo dialects or compared the social and linguistic commonalties and contrasts in the progress of the shift and the vowel classes affected. The present study explores how ethnic and regional alignment affects the dispersion of fronting in three key back vowel classes, the BOOT, BOOK, and BOAT classes. Using instrumental acoustic measurement of relevant vowel classes, this article will examine both the social and linguistic conditioning governing the fronting of these classes in White and Black speakers in Memphis, TN, looking at these results in light of those found by
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.