Apparent-time evolution of /l/ in one African American community

Abstract

In the wake of numerous analyses of vowels in African American English (AAE), this study examines acoustically the phonetic production of a consonant—the word-initial lateral /l/—across several generations of speakers from a long-standing African American community in central North Carolina. The results of the study show that /l/ is darker in younger AAE speakers than in older ones, independent of phonetic context. Comparisons with ex-slave recordings suggest that a light variant of /l/ may be a substrate feature of AAE that has changed in recent decades. Additional comparisons with regional European Americans suggest that the darkening may be due to convergence with majority American English dialects.

Sociophonetic variation in a long‐term language contact situation: /l/‐darkening in Welsh‐English bilingual speech

“…Giles and Moll ; Scobbie and Wrench ; Recasens and Espinosa ; Oxley et al. ; Van Hofwegen ; Davidson ) but do not suggest that there are differences between /l/ in absolute word‐initial syllable onsets and /l/ in word‐initial stop clusters (see section 2.4).…”

“…As stated in section 1, darkening correlates acoustically with higher F 1 and lower F 2 values. This study uses the difference between Bark‐transformed F 2 and F 1 values (Traunmüller ) taken at the midpoint of the lateral (Simonet ; Van Hofwegen ; Nance ). Lighter tokens of /l/ have higher F 2 ‐F 1 (Bark) values compared to darker tokens.…”

“…As it did not, log‐durations were used in the models reported here based on the Skewness test results and in order to enable comparison with other studies (e.g. Van Hofwegen ; Turton ).…”

“…Oxley et al. ; Van Hofwegen ; Davidson ). This influence is, however, weaker for dark /l/ than light /l/ (Recasens and Espinosa ).…”

“…Taking measurements at 30ms is arbitrary, but allowed formant values to be taken at the steady state of the vowel. This measurement was then transformed into Bark (Traunmüller ) and was normalised by calculating the difference between the Bark‐transformed F 2 of the vowel and the Bark‐transformed F 2 of the preceding or following /l/ (Van Hofwegen : 383). A higher normalised F 2 value corresponds to a fronter vowel.…”