Directions of Change in Southern California English

Abstract

has attributed to the miners of California a peculiar, strongly-marked, and affected dialect, but he has drawn on his imagination for the greater part of it. A mixed population like that in the mines, representing every state in the Union, and every county of Great Britain, could not have a dialect; and nowhere is the English language better understood, or spoken with more force, elegance, and purity, by the poorer classes of people, than in this State. 1 If you want to hear the general American of the future, Hollywood and TV-studio based, go to California and listen to the speech of the California-born younger generation (not, of course, to the immigrants from other states, who will carry their local intonations with them to their dying day). Do you recall how in the Presidential campaign of 1960, Kennedy's ahsk and Africar stood out like sore thumbs, while Nixon never drew a lifted eyebrow? Nixon spoke the general American of the future, an American shorn of all local peculiarities. 2 A century seems to have made little difference in the careful observer's s impression of California English. Linguists have provided specific evidence to confirm this impression. In an article based on preliminary results from the Linguistic Atlas of the Pacific Coast, David Reed concluded, &dquo;The popularity of a word in California tends to reflect the generality of its distribution in Eastern dialects. &dquo;3 A recent paper by Carroll Reed and David Reed again puts California in the middle of the road: &dquo;California seems to have more Midland traits than Washington or Idaho, but less than Oregon, &dquo; they report, and &dquo;Southern California shows a curious overlay of Northern and Midland forms, a situation occasioned ... by successive waves of settlement involving the simultaneous rrival of diverse elements by sea as well as by land routes. &dquo;4 Everyone would agree that California English is distinguished by its lack of distinctiveness. Of all speakers back East, Californians sound more like those from areas that once were termed &dquo;General American&dquo;--the Inland North and the North Midlands. Californians pronounce their postvocalic [r]'s, use the front vowel [as] in ask, never intrude an [r] between vowels, and so on. Iwill argue,however, that California's undistinctiveness is not always a copy or an average of Eastern models, and that it is not static. As immigrants have arrived in such numbers as to nearly overwhelm the natives, California English, as reflected in the speech of the native-born younger generations, has modified itself to maintain a structure of its own while remaining as unobtrusive as possible. This ringing conclusion is at present still just a hypothesis, but in the past three years I have gathered a considerable amount of information to support it.

The Construction of Social Meaning: A Matched-Guise Investigation of the California Vowel Shift

“…In an early study of California language variation, Metcalf (1972) found lexical and phonological leveling in Riverside relative to the Linguistic Atlas of the Pacific Coast (LAPC). Lexical forms such as couch or bag (vs. sofa or sack) that were slightly dominant when the LAPC was compiled had become more dominant in Metcalf's surveys.…”

On the role of social factors in the loss of phonemic distinctions

“…It is found throughout the South (Brown 1991;Montgomery & Elbe 2004;Tillery & Bailey 2004), though it is also present at scattered points across the US (Metcalf 1972;Bigham 2005;ANAE). In the South, it has been found to be receding recently in large urban centres such as Houston (Koops et al 2008), Dallas and Atlanta (Tillery & Bailey 2004), likely due to a large influx of non-Southerners in the last few decades (Thomas 1997(Thomas , 2004.…”

“…The pin–pen merger is a conditioned merger of /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ before front nasals, as in pin–pen, him–hem, sinned–send , etc. It is found throughout the South (Brown 1991; Montgomery & Elbe 2004; Tillery & Bailey 2004), though it is also present at scattered points across the US (Metcalf 1972; Bigham 2005; ANAE). In the South, it has been found to be receding recently in large urban centres such as Houston (Koops et al .…”

Cue restructuring in English u-fronting: The role of phonetics and phonology in feature-learning

“…The fronting of /u/ has been documented in a host of dialects and areas of the English-speaking world. The F2 of /u/ is rising, in, among other varieties, British English (Gimson, 1970), in California English (Metcalf, 1972;Hinton et al, 1987), in Māori English and New Zealand English (Maclagan et al, 2009), and in the South of the US (Bailey, 1997). In this section I present results of an acoustic analysis comparing data from the Nationwide Speech Corpus (NSC: Clopper & Pisoni, 2006) and Lang & Davidson (2016), which reveals acoustic changes in the English vowel system in the Northeast US.…”