Ethnicity

Fought, Carmen

doi:10.1002/9781118335598.ch18

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Until fairly recently, the literature on African American (Vernacular) English has often assumed that it has little regional variation 1 . For example, while Wolfram & Schilling-Estes (1998:174-175) recognized that there is some regional variation in the dialect (e.g., Northern metropolitan vs. Southern rural varieties), they wrote that “one of the most noteworthy aspects of AAVE is the common core of features shared across different regions … the regional differences do not come close to the magnitude of the regional differences that exist across Anglo varieties.” However, Wolfram (2007) and Fought (2013) have since cautioned sociolinguists against making assumptions about the uniformity of AAE. Recent work has shown that there is in fact considerable regional variation in the dialect (e.g., studies in Yaeger-Dror & Thomas, 2010; Lanehart, 2015), but African Americans’ perspectives on the issue have gone mostly unexplored.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Folk Perception of African American English Regional Variation

Mitchell

Lesho

Walker

2017

J. of Ling. Geography

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Contrary to previous “sociolinguistic folklore” that African American (Vernacular) English has a uniform structure across different parts of the US, recent studies have shown that it varies regionally, especially phonologically (Wolfram, 2007; Thomas & Wassink, 2010). However, there is little research on how Americans perceive AAE variation. Based on a map-labeling task, we investigate the folk perception of AAE variation by 55 participants, primarily African Americans in Columbus, Ohio. The analysis focuses on the dialect regions recognized by the participants, the linguistic features associated with different regions, and the attitudes associated with these beliefs. While the perceived regional boundaries mostly align with those identified by speakers in previous perceptual dialectology studies on American English, the participants consistently identified linguistic features that were specific to AAE. The participants recognized substantial phonological and lexical variation and identified “proper” dialects that do not necessarily sound “white”. This study demonstrates the value of considering African Americans’ perspectives in describing African American varieties of English.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Folk Perception of African American English Regional Variation

Mitchell

Lesho

Walker

2017

J. of Ling. Geography

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“…Local speech patterns such as the NCS have traditionally been associated with European American speakers (e.g., Labov, 2001). As such, the speech of European American speakers has been traditionally used as a benchmark to compare the speech of ethnic minority speakers against in the field of language variation and change (Fought, 2013). Recently, variationists have focused more on the internal community comparisons (see, e.g., Holliday, 2019;King, 2021) which highlights variation in the speech of minority groups.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Evidence from MENA Americans in the Upper Midwest and southern California

Sheydaei

2023

English Today

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Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) Americans are an understudied speech community in sociolinguistics. In terms of racial classification and identification, MENA Americans have been legally and historically classified as white but are not socially perceived as white (Beydoun, 2013, 2015). While early immigrants from MENA regions to the US were mostly Christians, ever since 1947, the majority of immigrants from MENA regions to the US have been from Muslim backgrounds (Orfalea, 2006); this demographic change can result in more ethnic visibility for MENA Americans in the US (cf., e.g., Shryock & Lin, 2009, for a discussion of ethnic visibility of MENA Americans in southeastern Michigan). Higher ethnic visibility can in turn lead to certain linguistic performances on the part of MENA Americans. Several studies have looked at the interaction of ethnic identity/visibility and local vowel patterns such as the merging of the low back vowels (the vowels in THOUGHT and LOT1). For example, Hall–Lew (2009) showed that Asian Americans in San Francisco took part in the low back vowel merger and high back vowel fronting, which both index local meanings being part of the California Vowel Shift (Eckert, 2008). Going beyond one particular locality, Wong and Hall–Lew (2014) demonstrated clear influence of local dialect on the speech of Asian Americans in two different localities, with Asian Americans from NYC having distinct low back vowels and those from San Francisco merged low back vowels. Comparing the speech of three different ethnic groups in the multicultural context of Toronto, Hoffman and Walker (2010) explored two features of the Canadian Vowel Shift: the retraction of TRAP and the lowering and retraction of DRESS. Their findings showed that while Chinese Canadians disfavored these two patterns, British/Irish and Italian Canadians favored them. In another study in the context of California English, Cardoso et al. (2016) looked at subclasses of the TRAP vowel in the speech of Chinese Americans and white Americans of San Francisco. They found that the nasal split of TRAP (it being raised when followed by a nasal consonant, and being retracted and lowered when followed by an oral consonant) was more advanced for white speakers than the Chinese group. Cardoso et al. (2016) associated the observed difference to the social meaning of the TRAP nasal split in California indexing white or non-Chicanx social personae.

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“…7 Cf. (Fought 2013). The variation in the realisation of /z/ is focused on in Van Meel et al (2013), that in the realisation of the diphthong in Van Meel et al (2014) and that in the contrast of /α-a/ in Van Meel et al (2019).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variation in R-Pronouns in Moroccan and Turkish Ethnolectal Dutch and What It Tells Us

Hinskens

2022

Languages

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R-pronouns are R-words which feature as pronouns in prepositional phrases (among other things). They are common in Dutch and German (e.g., D. daarmee, G. damit, lit. ‘therewith’, ‘with that’, D. erna, G. danach, lit. ‘hereafter’, ‘after this’). This contribution concerns a quantitative study of variation in R-pronouns in modern Moroccan and Turkish ethnolectal Dutch. In conversational speech of bilingual speakers of Moroccan Dutch, Turkish Dutch and two groups of monolingual ‘white’ Dutch (one of them being the control group), R-pronouns appear to vary in three dimensions: the R-pronoun can or cannot be realized (with the latter option violating the norms of Dutch); if it is realized, the R-pronoun and the preposition can or cannot be split (both options conform the norms of Standard Dutch), if the R-pronoun is not realized, then either another pronoun is used instead or there is no substitute (both variants violate the norms of Dutch). For all three dimensions of variation, statistical analyses were carried out, starting from a total of 1160 realizations by 52 representatives of the four groups. The analyses involved three internal parameters and four social ones. The results serve to answer research questions concerning the origin of the variation, its place in the verbal repertoires and the social spread of the variation.

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Ethnicity

Cited by 16 publications

References 27 publications

Folk Perception of African American English Regional Variation

Folk Perception of African American English Regional Variation

The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Evidence from MENA Americans in the Upper Midwest and southern California

Variation in R-Pronouns in Moroccan and Turkish Ethnolectal Dutch and What It Tells Us

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