Mapping a Dialect “Mixtury”: Vowel Phonology of African American and White Men in Rural Southern Louisiana

Words, Woods, Woyds: Variation and Accommodation in Schwar Realization among African American, White, and Houma Men in Southern Louisiana

“…It is also important to recognize that we may not see similar long-term effects of accommodation across all elements of a given linguistic system. For instance, while the present study indicates historical accommodation to regional norms for schwar realization, other research we have conducted on local vowel phonologies for Creole African American and white Cajun speakers (Wroblewski, Strand, & Dubois 2010) does not show any clear evidence of similar accommodation over time. In terms of contemporary vowel phonology, Creoles and Cajuns share a range of local features that continue to be distinct from southern norms.…”

“…While this has been the recent trend for postvocalic /r/ in the South in general, recent research on the English spoken by white Cajuns in southern Louisiana has documented persistent high rates of r-lessness (Dubois & Horvath 2004). Recent studies of Cajun English (Dubois & Horvath 1998a, 1998b, 2001, 2003c, 2004Wroblewski, Strand, & Dubois 2010) have demonstrated that while it shares many morphosyntactic and phonological features with Southern English, there is evidence that it maintains a "distinctive coherence as a separate dialect" (Dubois & Horvath 2004:411). Dubois andHorvath (2003a, 2003b) also find that the English spoken by white Cajuns and Creole African Americans in southern Louisiana shares many characteristics; however, neither schwar nor postvocalic /r/ has been discussed in previous research on Creole AAE.…”

Accommodative Tendencies in Multidialect Communication

“…Using this methodology, African American English (AAE) speakers can be shown generally to contrast at least one or more locally salient vowel variants with one or two salient features indexing broader ethnic identity (Wolfram 2007;. The vowel comparisons relevant to the studies here appear in articles about rural Louisiana (Wroblewski, Strand, & Dubois 2010), St. Louis (Majors & Gordon 2008), and New York City (Becker 2009;Coggshall & Becker 2010). Taking all these studies as a whole, we observe a general pattern whereby no one feature is universally chosen to index ethnic or local identity.…”