African American Vernacular English: Vowel Phonology in a Georgia Community

Andres, Claire; Votta, Rachel

doi:10.1215/-94-1-75

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Evidence for the SVS in Georgia is also found in metro Atlanta, despite the city's status as “an exception to the predominant linguistic pattern of the South” (Labov et al, 2006:261). Among twelve speakers in Roswell, Andres and Votta (2009) found that although many speakers had some SVS features, none showed all three stages; but there was “swapping” of face and dress among younger metro-Atlanta speakers. In Atlanta, Prichard (2010) reported on the SVS in interview data with five speakers.…”

Section: Development and Change Of Vowel Systems In White Georgia Spe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the late twentieth century, younger White speakers have shifted away from Southern speech in Georgia. White Gen X and Millennial speakers are observed to show a more diphthongal price vowel (Prichard, 2010) and less Southern-shifted face and dress vowels (Andres & Votta, 2009:94), even among rural speakers (McNair, 2005). In Georgia, younger Millennial and Gen Z speakers exhibit the LBMS, defined by retraction and lowering of the front lax vowels to a greater degree than older speakers.…”

Section: Development and Change Of Vowel Systems In White Georgia Spe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recordings in Roswell, Georgia, were collected within the Roswell Voices Project, largely in 2003 and 2006 (Kretzschmar, 2016; Kretzschmar, Andres, Votta, & Johnson, 2006; Kretzschmar, Lanehart, Anderson, & Childs, 2004). This corpus includes oral history interviews and word lists with long-term residents of Roswell, Georgia, an urbanizing “exurb” of Atlanta (Andres & Votta, 2009). We analyze nineteen speakers here, born 1905-1983.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English

et al. 2023

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The late twentieth century in the United States marks the decline of regional vowel systems like the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift, replaced by supralocal systems like the Low-Back-Merger Shift. We chart such change in acoustic data from seven generations of White speakers (n = 135) in the Southeastern state of Georgia. We analyze front vowels affected by both the SVS and LBMS (dress, trap), plus price and face, known respectively to monophthongize and centralize in the SVS, and LBMS-implicated lot/thought. The SVS is most advanced among Georgians born in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in face-centralization. In Generation X, retraction of front lax vowels begins, leading toward the LBMS. These results, which hold across genders and education levels, support findings that regional vowel systems declined precipitously following a Gen X “cliff,” raising questions about how such language changes are rooted in demographic transformations of that time period.

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Section: Development and Change Of Vowel Systems In White Georgia Spe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Development and Change Of Vowel Systems In White Georgia Spe...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English

et al. 2023

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Roswell Voices: Community Language in a Living Laboratory

Kretzschmar

2016

Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora

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Modeling dynamic trajectories of front vowels in the American South

Renwick

Stanley

2020

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Regional variation in American English speech is often described in terms of shifts, indicating which vowel sounds are converging or diverging. In the U.S. South, the Southern vowel shift (SVS) and African American vowel shift (AAVS) affect not only vowels' relative positions but also their formant dynamics. Static characterizations of shifting, with a single pair of first and second formant values taken near vowels' midpoint, fail to capture this vowel-inherent spectral change, which can indicate dialect-specific diphthongization or monophthongization. Vowel-inherent spectral change is directly modeled to investigate how trajectories of front vowels /i eɪ ɪ ɛ/ differ across social groups in the 64-speaker Digital Archive of Southern Speech. Generalized additive mixed models are used to test the effects of two social factors, sex and ethnicity, on trajectory shape. All vowels studied show significant differences between men, women, African American and European American speakers. Results show strong overlap between the trajectories of /eɪ, ɛ/ particularly among European American women, consistent with the SVS, and greater vowel-inherent raising of /ɪ/ among African American speakers, indicating how that lax vowel is affected by the AAVS. Model predictions of duration additionally indicate that across groups, trajectories become more peripheral as vowel duration increases.

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African American Vernacular English: Vowel Phonology in a Georgia Community

Cited by 4 publications

References 7 publications

Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English

Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English

Roswell Voices: Community Language in a Living Laboratory

Modeling dynamic trajectories of front vowels in the American South

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