The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change
... American Speech and Boberg 2006) historically associated with White speakers in this region. In metalinguistic commentary drawn from the sociolinguistic interviews analyzed here, speakers project elite education (ideologically linked to the LBMS by D'Onfrio 2016 and Benheim 2023) and multiculturalism (connected to the LBMS by Hall-Lew 2009, and D'Onofrio and Benheim 2020, social meanings sought by upwardly mobile young people of multiple regional and ethnic backgrounds. ...
... the rise of the low-back-merger shift. Located in the Southeastern region of the United States, Georgia is historically associated with the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006), which involves the lowering and backing of /eɪ/ and the raising and fronting of /ɛ/; to a more limited extent (Dodsworth and Kohn 2012), the lowering and backing of / i/ and the raising (Renwick et al. 2023), but these characterizations are difficult to delineate empirically. From a first-wave perspective (Eckert 2012), the decline of the SVS (and, in some authors' framing, the concomitant rise of the LBMS) is led by young people and women (Fridland 2001;Renwick et al. 2023), both often at the forefront of language change; by urban speakers (Thomas 1997;Labov et al. 2006;Dodsworth and Kohn 2012;Glass and Forrest 2024), who may have more contact with newcomers; and by speakers of higher socioeconomic status (Fridland 2001), who may orient toward supralocal norms (Eckert 2000). ...
... Located in the Southeastern region of the United States, Georgia is historically associated with the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006), which involves the lowering and backing of /eɪ/ and the raising and fronting of /ɛ/; to a more limited extent (Dodsworth and Kohn 2012), the lowering and backing of / i/ and the raising (Renwick et al. 2023), but these characterizations are difficult to delineate empirically. From a first-wave perspective (Eckert 2012), the decline of the SVS (and, in some authors' framing, the concomitant rise of the LBMS) is led by young people and women (Fridland 2001;Renwick et al. 2023), both often at the forefront of language change; by urban speakers (Thomas 1997;Labov et al. 2006;Dodsworth and Kohn 2012;Glass and Forrest 2024), who may have more contact with newcomers; and by speakers of higher socioeconomic status (Fridland 2001), who may orient toward supralocal norms (Eckert 2000). ...
This article analyzes the vowel systems of 56 Asian American college students in Atlanta, Georgia, with reference to 26 Black and 125 White peers. With the greatest overlap between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ and the lowest and backest /æ/, Asian Americans are at the forefront of the rising, supralocal Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS), although they show a backer /o/ and a lower and backer prenasal /æ/ than is usually associated with the LBMS. No significant differences are found among those of South, East, or Southeast Asian backgrounds nor among those with family heritage from India, China, or Korea, consistent with speakers’ recognition of a (pan)–Asian American identity. In metalinguistic commentary, speakers project elite education and cosmopolitanism, illuminating the social meanings that may propel the rise of the LBMS across regions and ethnicities.
... That social information biases speech perception has cascading effects on word recognition. Such is the case for listeners of the Northern dialect of American English (Clopper & Bradlow, 2008), the region that includes Detroit listeners and is characterized by a vowel chain shift that deviates acoustically from a collection of perceptually similar dialects known as General American English (Clopper et al., 2006;Labov et al., 2005). In a speech intelligibility in noise task with Northern and General AmE speech stimuli, Clopper & Bradlow (2008) found that Northern listeners exhibited lower intelligibility scores for Northern words than for General AmE words. ...
... I hypothesize that the discrepancy between our results and those of Lahiri & Marlsen-Wilson (1991) may be due to the complexity of the /ae/ vowel in AmE, of which there is an overrepresentation in our stimulus set (n=9/20 pairs). Many dialects of AmE exhibit what is known as a split-/ae/ system, in which nasal /ae/ is raised in comparison to oral /ae/, to the extent that the formant structure at its midpoint can be closer to /ɛ/ (Labov et al., 2005). Further, in the Northern dialect of AmE, the dialect region of sixteen of the nineteen English listeners, both nasal and oral /ae/ undergo further raising, part of a vowel chain shift known as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (Labov et al., 2005). ...
... Many dialects of AmE exhibit what is known as a split-/ae/ system, in which nasal /ae/ is raised in comparison to oral /ae/, to the extent that the formant structure at its midpoint can be closer to /ɛ/ (Labov et al., 2005). Further, in the Northern dialect of AmE, the dialect region of sixteen of the nineteen English listeners, both nasal and oral /ae/ undergo further raising, part of a vowel chain shift known as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (Labov et al., 2005). ...
Late bilingual (L2) speech perception is shaped by the native language (L1) sound system. Equipped with a sensitivity to L1 sound patterns, late bilinguals must contend with the variable nature of speech in their second language for successful word recognition. It is well-known that L2 speech perception is often hampered by a lack of sensitivity to acoustic cues relevant to distinguish L2 sounds, though there is relatively less work on L2 processing of subphonemic variation. Additionally, languages show socially-conditioned variation, including at the phonetic level, and very little is known about the effect of such variation on L2 speech perception. The aim of this dissertation is to extend our knowledge of late bilingual perception of both phonetic and sociophonetic cues. The first set of experiments investigates L1 French listeners' sensitivity to and use of English allophonic vowel nasality (e.g., man [maẽn] vs. mad [maed]) during word recognition. Results revealed that French listeners have learned the allophonic distribution and use it to rule out lexical competitors in online word recognition, just as native English listeners do. The second set of experiments explores L1 and L2 French listeners' perception of two sociophonetic cues to register in Metropolitan French: optional liaison, a stereotyped cue to formal speech (e.g., plats_ italiens [pla.zi.ta.ljɛ] for plats italiens [pla.i.ta.ljɛ] 'Italian dishes') and post-obstruent liquid deletion, a non-stereotyped cue to everyday speech (e.g., tab' [tab] for table /tabl/ 'table'), with matched-guise perception tasks. While L1 listeners demonstrated both explicit and implicit association of optional liaison with formal speech (i.e., with and without noticing the presence of optional liaison in the speech stimuli), sociolinguistic perception of optional liaison hinged on explicit noticing for L2 French listeners. In contrast, both L1 and L2 listeners exhibited almost exclusively implicit association of liquid deletion with everyday speech. Taken together, results from this dissertation display the potential for future research on L2 perception of phonetic variation, and highlight the need for updated models of L2 speech perception that account for L2 listener sensitivity to phonetic and sociophonetic cues.
KEYWORDS sociophonetics, bilingualism, speech perception, language acquisition, word recognition, phonology
... Specifically, we expected that listeners from these three groups would have different amounts of general and specific familiarity with the front lax vowel shift present in our talker's novel accent. The three listener groups were American Westerners, Southerners, and New Englanders. Figure 1 shows each of these regions, based on Labov et al. (2006). ...
... We expected Western listeners to have lifelong exposure to the California Vowel Shift, which is characterized by backed and lowered /ɪ ɛ ae/ (Labov et al., 2006), as shown in Figure 2. The shift employed in the novel accent is similar, but not identical, to the California Vowel Shift, in that it involved front lax vowel backing but not lowering. We expected Southern listeners to have lifelong exposure to the Southern Vowel Shift, which is characterized by raised and fronted /ɪ ɛ/ (Labov et al., 1972), as shown in Figure 3. ...
... Therefore, Southern listeners were expected to have general familiarity with shifted /ɪ ɛ/, but not specific familiarity with /ɪ ɛ/ backing. We expected New England listeners to have lifelong exposure to the New England dialect, which is characterized by nonrhoticity and the low back merger; front lax vowels have not been described as involved in a shift in New England (Labov et al., 2006;Nesbitt & Stanford, 2021). ...
When adapting to novel vowel shifts, listeners rely on the systematicity of novel variants across vowel categories (e.g., parallel shifts), even when only part of a novel system is presented. We examined how a listener’s experience with components of a novel English front lax vowel backing shift impacts perceptual adaptation and generalization. First, listeners were exposed to no front lax vowels, shifted /ɪ/, shifted /ɪ æ/, or shifted /ɪ ɛ æ/. Then, listeners responded to items with shifted /ɪ ɛ æ/ in a lexical decision task. Listeners had varied dialect experience due to residential history. Westerners were experienced with /ɪ ɛ æ/ backing in the California Vowel Shift, Southerners were experienced with parallel movements of /ɪ ɛ/ but in another direction in the Southern Vowel Shift, and New Englanders were minimally experienced with front lax vowel shifts. Westerners and New Englanders endorsed more critical words in the /ɪ æ/ exposure condition than in the /ɪ/ exposure condition, consistent with a phonological feature theory of generalization, but Southerners endorsed fewer. Southerners’ lack of familiarity with /æ/ shifting in parallel with /ɪ ɛ/ inhibited perceptual adaptation and generalization, suggesting that dialect experience affects listeners’ perceptual processing of novel vowel shifts.
... American English is generally rhotic, meaning the "r" sound is pronounced, such as in "hard and "car"." In contrast, British English, especially RP, is non-rhotic, so the "r" is often silent unless followed by a vowel (Labov et al., 2006). For example, "car" is pronounced /kɑː/ in British English but /kɑːr/ in American English. ...
... This divergence in pronunciation can be traced back to the 17th and 18th centuries, when English settlers brought their language to America. Over time, American English underwent its own phonetic changes, influenced by contact with other languages, such as Native American languages, Dutch, and Spanish (Labov et al., 2006). While this, British English developed further with RP being a prestige accent in the 19th century (Cruttenden, 2014). ...
... However, it also comprises smaller communities at the city, town, or social network level. As the Atlas of North American English (ANAE) [5] documents, the United States is home to an incredibly diverse array of English varieties, subsets of which are in sociolinguistic contact. Many of the same techniques and theories that are used to understand the interaction of speaker communities of different l anguages c an b e u sed t o u nderstand t he i nteraction o f s peaker c ommunities of different varieties o f a s ingle l anguage, u sually r eferred t o a s " dialects" [ 8, ch. 1 ]. ...
... This view assumes chain shifts occur to maintain clarity, akin to musicians adjusting pitch to avoid dissonance.5 In NetLogo, agents are called "turtles". ...
... Pronunciation per se "is one of the most fleeting aspects of linguistic development" (Foster, 1968, p. 234). Inquiry into the sound environment of 19 th -century Amherst is complicated by the absence of audio-recording technologies which only later, in the 20 th and 21 st centuries, have provided a solid basis for synchronic American-English dialectology (see, e.g., dialectological surveys conducted by Kurath [1939] and Labov et al. [2006]). "[B]y using speech records internal reconstruction can proceed no farther back than the mid-nineteenth century at the very outer limit" (Montgomery, 2003, p. 2). ...
... It has been customary to distinguish such wide dialect areas of American English as the Northern (or New England), Southern, Middle and -later -Western States (e.g., Baugh & Cable, 1951, p. 346;or Labov et al., 2006). The manifold resources describing the local speech are often framed within the broader regional identity of "New England." ...
Taking seed in the highly formal lyrical climate of 19th-century America, the rhymes of poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) are often seen as distinct, even eccentric. The popular axiom is that Dickinson’s rhyming was “irregular,” “odd,” and “unorthodox.” Dickinson’s “slant” rhymes have become a trademark of her style. But if we could hear how people spoke in a time predating the advent of audio recording technology, would we perceive the same kind of poetry? Several large studies drew considerable attention to the effects of sound on Emily Dickinson’s rhymes. But, as yet, literary critics have not fully embraced the possibilities historical phonology provides for illuminating this important topic.
This dissertation establishes the methodological foundation for reconstructing features of Dickinson’s original pronunciation, rooted in the dialectal textures of 19th-century New England. The analysis of the older speech patterns based on the assessment of a wide range of written records, such as pronouncing dictionaries or evidence of regional rhymes, illuminates the intricate relationship between Dickinson’s phonetic world and the poetics she forged. By doing so, the project casts new light on how the poet could have sounded her own verses and how her famous “slant” rhymes have been misheard. This research challenges the predominant perception of Dickinson's poetics as idiosyncratic and unconventional by demonstrating that her rhymes, when read with the poet’s native accent, appear more regular than previously thought. The dissertation addresses significant gaps and inconsistencies in the critical understanding of Dickinson’s rhymes and provides a foundational tool for re-reading her rhymes within their authentic soundscape.
The methods of historical phonology, corpus linguistics, and statistical analysis converge in the form of a database of Dickinson’s rhymes that shapes a structured approach to their exploration. Significantly, the database furnishes a more visually intuitive framework for engaging with extensive datasets – here, the vast corpus of the poet’s rhymes – offering a renewed means of discerning underlying patterns with systematic clarity. Thus, working across the disciplines of literature and historical linguistics, the dissertation redeems the role of sound for critical understanding of Dickinson’s rhymes.
... Empirical research in sociolinguistics and dialectology has long shown that the language use of people from different social groups (Tagliamonte, 2006(Tagliamonte, , 2011 and identities (Eckert, 2012(Eckert, , 2018Ilbury, 2020) is characterized by systematic patterns of linguistic variation, especially variation in accent and vocabulary. For example, William Labov and his colleagues have analyzed variation in the pronunciation of American English in great detail (Bell et al., 2016;Gordon, 2017), from variation across class and other demographic variables in the pronunciation of /r/ post-vocalically in New York City (Labov, 1986(Labov, , 1973) to mapping regional variation in the pronunciation of the entire English vowel system across North America (Labov et al., 2006). Lexical variation has also notably been the focus of considerable recent research in computational linguistics, primarily based on large corpora of social media (Donoso and Sánchez, 2017;Grieve et al., 2019;Huang et al., 2016;Bamman et al., 2014). ...
... Finally, if a variety of language is defined as a population of texts delimited by some set of external criteria, the general expectation is that this population of texts will differ from populations of texts delimited by other external criteria in terms of its linguistic structure, including its grammar, phonology, lexis, and discourse (Crystal and Davy, 1969;Jackson, 2007). For example, among other features, a regional dialect may be characterized by the specific pronunciation of certain vowels (Labov et al., 2006), whereas a conversational register might be characterized by its rate of use of certain pronouns (Biber and Conrad, 2019). Crucially, we can expect that any social group or any social context that is recognized within society will generally become associated with distinct patterns of linguistic variation over time. ...
In this article, we introduce a sociolinguistic perspective on language modeling. We claim that language models in general are inherently modeling varieties of language , and we consider how this insight can inform the development and deployment of language models. We begin by presenting a technical definition of the concept of a variety of language as developed in sociolinguistics. We then discuss how this perspective could help us better understand five basic challenges in language modeling: social bias, domain adaptation, alignment, language change , and scale . We argue that to maximize the performance and societal value of language models it is important to carefully compile training corpora that accurately represent the specific varieties of language being modeled, drawing on theories, methods, and descriptions from the field of sociolinguistics.
... In United States dialectology of the early to mid twentieth century, non-mobile older rural males were the unmarked case, even to the extent that they were referred to by the backronym NORMs (Chambers and Trudgill 1998); by the time we got to the late twentieth century, though, the target was (largely white) urban women in their mid-20s (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006). It is always important to notice what we JLAR 3 (2025) 10.15460/jlar.2025.3.1.1832 ...
We begin with the fear of aging, which is pervasive in popular culture but, we suggest, also shapes the questions scholars ask and the assumptions we bring to language and aging research. The scholarly literature seems to associate the concept of aging with negatively valenced terms (e.g., fear, decline), suggesting that research may unintentionally reinforce negative narratives about aging. While understanding negative outcomes of aging is clearly important, focusing on them too much risks creating a feedback loop. We also draw attention to how “unmarked” norms in language research (e.g., who counts as the typical speaker) shift over time and reflect broader social assumptions. Inspired by Pierre Nora’s concept of ego-histoire, we argue that scholars working at the intersection of language and aging should explicitly acknowledge how personal experiences and expectations inform their research questions and interpretations. We encourage authors submitting to the Journal of Language and Aging Research to include such reflexive insights, which can enrich the scholarly record and support more nuanced, context-sensitive understandings of language and aging research.
... Another issue with conventional methodologies lies in the elicitation of a speaker's explicit knowledge of phonological contrasts. Speakers are often asked to provide their self-judgments about whether the vowels in minimal pairs should be pronounced the same or differently (Di Paolo & Faber, 1990;Labov et al,, 2006;Labov et al., 1991). This could be potentially problematic because speakers might resort to differences in spelling, rather than their abstract knowledge of phonemic representations (Austen, 2020). ...
This work explores the combined effects of social expectations and a speaker’s production characteristics on the perception of alveolar versus retroflex sibilants that are variably merged in Taiwan Mandarin. The variation is socially structured in that the sibilant merger is regarded as a characteristic feature of speakers from southern Taiwan. The results of an AXB discrimination task showed that although merged speakers were outperformed by their distinct counterparts, they were able to discriminate the sibilants far beyond chance level. In an identification task with social guises, participants showed a pattern reflecting the implicit bias that a southern-labeled talker is less likely to produce retroflexes, and hence use the merged form, than a northern-labeled talker. Interestingly, merged participants were again shown to be less sensitive to frication noise cues, but they more readily switched between the social and acoustic cues than distinct participants. Together, these results indicate that frequent encounters with distinct forms in a speech community with large interspeaker variation might help merged speakers remain sensitive to phonological distinctions that they do not carry. Merged speakers might have been desensitized to the acoustic cues to some degree; however, they appear to use other cues to achieve coherent speech perception whenever possible.
... For English, the Nationwide Speech Project (Clopper and Pisoni, 2006) corpus was used. 1 It contains speech of 60 speakers, 10 from each of the 6 dialect regions of American English (Labov et al., 2006), 5 female and 5 male speakers for each region. A number of speech styles were elicited from each speaker. ...
... Instead, we used a scaled Nearey transformation. As Thomas and Kendall note, Nearey's method, a version of which was used for vowel normalization for the data presented in the Atlas of North American English (Labov et al., 2005) is "best only when a study has an exceptionally high subject count" (Thomas and Kendall, 2007), a condition which is likely for this data, although the exact number of speakers is unknown. ...
Prelateral merger of /e/ and /ae/ (where words like celery and salary are both pronounced with [ae] in the first syllable) is a salient acoustic feature of speech from Melbourne and the state of Victoria in Australia, but little is known about its presence in other parts of the country. In this study, automated methods of data collection, forced alignment, and formant extraction are used to analyze the regional distribution of the vowel merger within all of Australia, in 4.3 million vowel tokens from naturalistic speech in 252 locations. The extent of the merger is quantified using the difference in Bhattacharyya's distance scores based on phonetic context, and the regional distribution is assessed using spatial autocorrelation. The principal findings are that the merger is most prominent in Victoria, especially southern Victoria, and least prominent in Sydney and New South Wales. We also find preliminary indications that it may be present in other parts of the country.
... To establish the number of classes for this task, instead of assigning the labels based on the states, we applied the classification of the major regional dialects of American English as demarcated by Labov et al. [66]. This classification divides the map of the United States into six dialect regions. ...
In recent years, the advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) and large language models (LLMs) have led to major breakthroughs and new levels of performance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including tasks related to speech processing. Based on these new trends, new models such as Whisper and Wav2Vec 2.0 achieve robust performance in speech processing tasks, even in speech-to-text translation and end-to-end speech translation, far exceeding all previous results. Although these models have shown excellent results in real-time speech processing, they still have some accuracy issues for some tasks and high latency problems when working with large amounts of audio data. In addition, many of them need audio to be segmented and labelled for speech synthesis and annotation tasks. Speaker diarisation, background noise detection, prosodic boundary detection and accent classification are some of the pre-processing tasks required in these cases. In this study, we will fine-tune a small Wav2Vec 2.0 base model for multi-task classification and audio segmentation. A corpus of spoken American English will be used for the experiments. We intend to explore this new approach and, more specifically, the performance of the model with regard to prosodic boundaries detection for audio segmentation, and advanced accent identification.
... Although dialect wasn't an exclusionary criterion for the present study, all participants indicated they use the North dialect (Labov et al., 2006). The North dialect is a variation of American English that is used primarily in Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan. ...
To develop AI tools that can communicate on par with human speakers and listeners, we need a deeper understanding of the factors that affect their perception and production of spoken language. Thus, the goal of this study was to examine to what extent two AI tools, Amazon Alexa and Polly, are impacted by factors that are known to modulate speech perception and production in humans. In particular, we examined the role of lexical (word frequency, phonological neighborhood density) and stylistic (speaking rate) factors. In the domain of perception, high-frequency words and slow speaking rate significantly improved Alexa’s recognition of words produced in real time by native speakers of American English (n = 21). Alexa also recognized words with low neighborhood density with greater accuracy, but only at fast speaking rates. In contrast to human listeners, Alexa showed no evidence of adaptation to the speaker over time. In the domain of production, Polly’s vowel duration and formants were unaffected by the lexical characteristics of words, unlike human speakers. Overall, these findings suggest that, despite certain patterns that humans and AI tools share, AI tools lack some of the flexibility that is the hallmark of human speech perception and production.
... Sociolinguistic studies have consistently shown that individuals adapt their phonological features to align with or distance themselves from particular groups (Eckert, 2000). Regional accents are among the most studied phonological phenomena (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006). In the United Kingdom, the distinction between Received Pronunciation (RP) and regional accents like Cockney or Scouse highlights how phonology can reflect class and regional identity (Trudgill, 1974). ...
... One plausible explanation for this pattern of vowel confusion lies in the substantial variation that exists across US English dialects (Labov et al., 2006). Differences in the realization of vowel categories, and associated representations, across dialects will directly affect the expected classification for any given token. ...
Human speech recognition tends to be robust, despite substantial cross-talker variability. Believed to be critical to this ability are auditory normalization mechanisms whereby listeners adapt to individual differences in vocal tract physiology. This study investigates the computations involved in such normalization. Two 8-way alternative forced-choice experiments assessed L1 listeners' categorizations across the entire US English vowel space—both for unaltered and synthesized stimuli. Listeners' responses in these experiments were compared against the predictions of 20 influential normalization accounts that differ starkly in the inference and memory capacities they imply for speech perception. This includes variants of estimation-free transformations into psycho-acoustic spaces, intrinsic normalizations relative to concurrent acoustic properties, and extrinsic normalizations relative to talker-specific statistics. Listeners' responses were best explained by extrinsic normalization, suggesting that listeners learn and store distributional properties of talkers' speech. Specifically, computationally simple (single-parameter) extrinsic normalization best fit listeners' responses. This simple extrinsic normalization also clearly outperformed Lobanov normalization—a computationally more complex account that remains popular in research on phonetics and phonology, sociolinguistics, typology, and language acquisition.
... To establish the number of classes for this task, instead of assigning the labels based on the states, we have applied the classification of the major regional dialects of American English demarcated by Labov et al. [64]. This classification divides the map of the United States in six dialect regions. ...
In recent years the advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) and large language models (LLMs) have led to major breakthroughs and new levels of performance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including speech processing related tasks. Based on these new trends, new models such as Whisper and Wav2Vec 2.0 achieve robust performance in speech processing tasks, even in speech-to-text translation and end-to-end speech translation, far exceeding all previous results. Although these models have shown excellent results in real-time speech processing, they still have some accuracy issues for some tasks and high latency problems when working with large amounts of audio data. In addition, many of them need audio to be segmented and labelled for speech synthesis and annotation tasks. Speaker diarisation, background noise detection, prosodic boundary detection and accent classification are some of the pre-processing tasks required in these cases. In this study we will fine-tune a small Wav2Vec 2.0 base model for multi-task classification and audio segmentation. A corpus of spoken American English will be used for the experiments. We intend to explore this new approach and, more specifically, the performance of the model with regards to prosodic boundaries detection for audio segmentation, and advanced accent identification.
Insertion of a consonant between a sonorant and voiceless obstruent is common in some environments in American English (e.g., prince = prints ). In this paper, we describe a similar process whereby /θ/ is realized as a dental affricate [ t̪͡θ] in the infrequent environment of /lθ/ (e.g., wealth and stealth ), a process we call “LTH affrication.” In audio collected using an online survey from a 265-person sample from the Rocky Mountain region of the United States, a third of them had LTH affrication. While the presence of LTH affrication was not predictable, the duration was: closure durations were longer among women, Utahns, suburban-oriented people, and practicing members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This paper offers a rare insight into production patterns of a sociolinguistic indicator and suggests that infrequent phonological variables may have as much sociolinguistic conditioning as more common variables. Finally, this paper adds to the description of the Latter-day Saint religiolect in Utah.
Research in Loanword Phonology has extensively examined the adaptation processes of Anglicisms into recipient languages. In the Tijuana–San Diego border region, where English and Spanish have reciprocally existed, Anglicisms exhibit two main phonetic patterns: some structures exhibit Spanish phonetic properties, while others preserve English phonetic features. This study analyzes 131 vowel tokens drawn from spontaneous conversations with 28 bilingual speakers in Tijuana, recruited via the sociolinguistic ‘friend-of-a-friend’ approach. Specifically, it focuses on monosyllabic Anglicisms with monophthongs by examining the F1 and F2 values using Praat. The results were compared with theoretical vowel targets in English and Spanish through Euclidean distance analysis. Dispersion plots generated in R further illustrate the acoustic distribution of vowel realizations. The results reveal that some vowels closely match Spanish targets, others align with English, and several occupy intermediate acoustic spaces. Based on these patterns, the study proposes two phonetically based corpora—Phonetically Adapted Anglicisms (PAA) and Phonetically Non-Adapted Anglicisms (PNAA)—to capture the nature of Anglicisms in this contact setting. This research offers an empirically grounded basis for cross-dialectal comparison and language contact studies from a phonetically based approach.
The adverb anymore is standardly a negative polarity item (NPI), which must be licensed by triggers of non-positive polarity. Some Englishes also allow anymore in positive-polarity clauses. Linguists have posited that this non-polarity anymore (NPAM) carries a feature of negative affect. However, this claim is based on elicited judgments, and linguists have argued that respondents cannot reliably evaluate NPAM via conscious judgment. To solve this problem, we employ sentiment analysis to examine the relationship between NPAM and negative affect in a Twitter corpus. Using two complementary sentiment analytic frameworks, we demonstrate that words occurring with NPAM have lower valence, higher arousal, and lower dominance than words occurring with NPI-anymore. Broadly, this confirms NPAM’s association with negative affect in natural-language productions. We additionally identify inter- and intra-regional differences in affective dimensions, as well as variability across different types of NPI trigger, showing that the relationship between negative affect and NPAM is not monolithic dialectally, syntactically, or semantically. The project demonstrates the utility of sentiment analysis for examining emotional characteristics of low-frequency variables, providing a new tool for dialectology, micro-syntax, and variationist sociolinguistics.
El objetivo central del presente capítulo consiste en presentar los principios teórico-metodológicos que subyacen a un estudio de dialectología. En tanto que el volumen tiene un enfoque primordialmente metodológico y práctico, me propongo presentar una guía de trabajo basada en mi propia experiencia, misma que seguí para aproximarme a la variación dialectal del idioma tének (o huasteco; de filiación maya). El presente trabajo pretende fungir como una especie de manual a través del cual la comunidad de estudiantes de lingüística puedan visualizar cada uno de los pasos que se siguen en la realización de un estudio dialectal. Aspira a brindar las herramientas mínimas para quien desee desarrollar una investigación de este corte en cualquiera de las lenguas indomexicanas. El trabajo se compone de dos secciones: en primer lugar discutiré los conceptos de dialectología, dialecto, lengua, variante y comunalecto, y al final de esta sección, presento un modelo de análisis dialectal basado en la forma en que entiendo cada uno de estos conceptos y la forma en que se relacionan. En la segunda sección me enfocaré en el estudio de caso donde mostraré resultados parciales de investigaciones realizadas anteriormente en torno a la variación sincrónica y diacrónica del tének (Meléndez, 2011; 2017; 2018).
Adults rate the speech of children assigned male at birth (AMAB) and assigned female at birth (AFAB) as young as 2.5 years of age differently on a scale of definitely a boy to definitely a girl (Munson et al., 2022), despite the lack of consistent sex dimorphism in children’s speech production mechanisms. This study used longitudinal data to examine the acoustic differences between AMAB and AFAB children and the association between the acoustic measures and perceived gender ratings of children’s speech. We found differences between AMAB and AFAB children in two acoustic parameters that mark gender in adult speech: the spectral centroid of /s/ and the overall scaling of resonant frequencies in vowels. These results demonstrate that children as young as 3 years old speak in ways that reflect their sex assigned at birth. We interpret this as evidence that children manipulate their speech apparatus volitionally to mark gender through speech.
The GIPSA-lab hosts an extensive archive of sound recordings documenting the Franco-Provençal and Sardinian linguistic regions. The first collection, consisting of approximately 450 tapes, was recorded by Gaston Tuaillon between 1955 and 1982. The second collection includes around 250 tapes from surveys conducted by Michel Contini in 214 Sardinian villages between 1964 and 1980. Both collections have been fully digitized. This paper details the origins, scope, and cultural significance of these invaluable archives, and addresses current efforts and challenges in increasing public access and awareness of these linguistic resources.
Multilingual phone recognition models can learn language-independent pronunciation patterns from large volumes of spoken data and recognize them across languages. This potential can be harnessed to improve speech technologies for underresourced languages. However, these models are typically trained on phonological representations of speech sounds, which do not necessarily reflect the phonetic realization of speech. A mismatch between a phonological symbol and its phonetic realizations can lead to phone confusions and reduce performance. This work introduces formant-based vowel categorization aimed at improving cross-lingual vowel recognition by uncovering a vowel's phonetic quality from its formant frequencies, and reorganizing the vowel categories in a multilingual speech corpus to increase their consistency across languages. The work investigates vowel categories obtained from a trilingual multi-dialect speech corpus of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish using three categorization techniques. Cross-lingual phone recognition experiments reveal that uniting vowel categories of different languages into a set of shared formant-based categories improves cross-lingual recognition of the shared vowels, but also interferes with recognition of vowels not present in one or more training languages. Cross-lingual evaluation on regional dialects provides inconclusive results. Nevertheless, improved recognition of individual vowels can translate to improvements in overall phone recognition on languages unseen during training.
US English (that is, American English spoken in the United States) is diversified geographically. The modern regional varieties, historically known as regional dialects, vary mostly in pronunciation patterns, but the common trend is that traditional regional features are increasingly diminished in younger speakers and the change is in the direction of standardized US English. This entry provides an overview of these regional dialects and considers their historical development and early documentation, main phonetic features defining major dialect regions in the United States, and new sound changes in progress that are currently crossing dialectal boundaries. The primary focus is on vowel production because the relations among vowels have been found to differentiate regional dialects of US English and to determine the direction of sound change within each regional variety.
The English spoken in the Midwest region of the United States is the geographic variety most associated with a translocal General United States English. The notion of “flyover‐country English” conveys a perceptual association of Midwestern English as correct and formal, yet unremarkable and placeless. However, the Midwest is rich in cultural history with plentiful variation giving rise to multiple enregistered local Midwestern Englishes. The association of Midwestern English with the translocal General United States English is an extension of the standardization process of US English, particularly codification through early tools oriented to Midwest English and adoption by (White) Midwestern educators. Despite the strongly perceived association of General United States English with 12 specific Midwestern states, behavioral dialect boundaries do not coincide with the states' political boundaries.
The popular phrase pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd is often believed to encapsulate New England English, but actually New England dialects are far more complex, in terms both of regional patterns and of sociolinguistic variability. This entry examines the past, present, and future of this fascinating North American dialect region. It is true that pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd highlights two of the traditional pronunciation features found in New England. However, many such features vary according to different subregions, such as Eastern New England versus Western New England. There are also important differences in terms of age, social class, ethnicity, and other factors. In fact, many of the traditional New England features are receding quickly among younger generations, while newer and less well‐known features are emerging.
Early dialectological work found that the speech of the US West lacked homogeneity and consistency, while at the same time exhibiting differences from the rest of the country. The diffusion of Northern, and to a lesser extent, Midland and Southern dialect forms into the US West yielded a “patchwork quilt” of features indicating that Western speech was too young to have formed its own distinctive dialect. This entry focuses on contemporary research undertaken in the Pacific Northwest, California, Intermountain, and Southwest subregions, which finds evidence of dialect focusing, pointing to emerging, clear differentiation between Western varieties of English. It provides a broad overview of the dialect subregions of the United States West, focusing on their phonetic features.
The early history of New York City English is little studied. However, despite continuous multilingualism, evidence of non‐English origin variants only appears in the late 1800s, from first Irish English, then Yiddish and Italian. Those features became stigmatized, and by Labov's (1966/2006) classic study, stigma affected the whole variety. Labov also shows African American and later Puerto Rican migrants arriving throughout the 1900s had not adopted New York City English features. From the 1960s, large‐scale global immigration transformed the raciolinguistic situation. Stigma dissipated although local features are declining among Whites. Black New Yorkers have adopted some, and Latinos and Asians show some local feature uptake. Recent variationist research highlights, however, diverse social meanings often related to ethnic identity, rather than ethnicity itself, as key in understanding current sociolinguistic variation.
Varieties of English in New Orleans, Louisiana, differ in significant ways from the rest of the US South. This entry describes the settlement history and development of New Orleans which has resulted in the dialects found in the city today, and provides examples of the linguistic features that differentiate these dialects from each other, and from other US dialects of English. Moreover, it details the recent lines of research examining the sociopolitical and linguistic effects of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city in 2005. Finally, it offers suggestions for future research on varieties of English in New Orleans.
This entry provides a broad description of the characteristic phonological features of “American English,” referring to a broad continuum of different varieties in the United States and Canada. It focuses on the segmental and suprasegmental traits that clearly distinguish American English from other English varieties. These include consonants, vowels, some phonological processes, and suprasegmentals and some of the sites of variation most commonly studied in the sociolinguistics and dialectology literature, such as ongoing vowel shifts and mergers. The entry concludes with some thoughts on where sociolinguistics might proceed in its study of American English(es).
Southern US Englishes are varieties that typically do not carry the prestige conferred to Inner Circle varieties of English. Yet, within the linguistic variation found in this region, one finds the same kind of variation present in world Englishes. As the US's largest region, there is immense diversity of voices and identities across the American South. It is difficult to encapsulate this diversity and present a multifaceted picture that goes beyond stereotypes and generalizations. A brief discussion of the history of English in the American South follows. Distinctive features associated with various varieties in the region are also presented. The sociohistorical context and production facts are then explored through an examination of the perceptions held about the South – both in terms of how outsiders perceive Southern US Englishes and how insiders present varying perceptions of their own speech, showcasing, through the lens of perceptual dialectology, how such ideologies impact Southern identities.
Mexican American English is a collection of dialects that are spoken by Mexican Americans and exhibit substrate features from Spanish. It developed in various parts of the United States and was shaped both by the discrimination and exploitation that Mexican Americans faced and by changing educational practices. However, it represents a model case of how an immigrant group develops their own dialects of the matrix language. Numerous vocalic and consonantal variants and a few prosodic variants are well documented as stable aspects of Mexican American English. Morphosyntactic forms that endure well beyond the first generation of English‐speaking Mexican Americans have proved harder to isolate. Mexican American English is not simply Spanish interference features, but represents a winnowing of interference features across generations of Mexican Americans.
This entry provides a broad characterization of Canadian and US Englishes, addressing the development of Canadian and US English, dialectology in the North American context, a comparison of distinctive features, ideologies and stereotypes, and the future of Canadian and US English. This entry discusses how Canadian and US English show many similarities that unite them as a supra‐regional variety of North American English. Despite lexical and phonetic differences, comparisons do not support a view of Canadian and US English as structurally distinct national varieties. The transborder spread of the Low‐Back‐Merger Shift and /aɪ/‐raising diminish the features previously believed to distinguish the varieties. Nonetheless, social and ideological factors illustrate a belief in two distinct national varieties.
Chain shifts refer to sound changes where the movement of one phoneme triggers reorganizations of related phonemes. Three such vowel shifts have shaped the landscape of language variation in US varieties of English: the Southern Vowel Shift, the Northern Cities Shift, and the Low‐Back‐Merger Shift. After introducing key sociolinguistic concepts, this entry provides an overview of these three shifts, including the structure, timing, location, and indexical attributes of each shift. Examination of these shifts not only provides insight into regional variation in American varieties of English, but also has the potential to uncover the mechanisms and pathways that facilitate language change.
This entry presents an overview of linguistic research into the Appalachian region of the United States. Appalachian English varieties have been described as some of the most divergent varieties in American English. Vowels, consonants, prosody, grammar, and the lexicon have all received scholarly attention. The entry begins with an exploration of exactly where Appalachia is, as the location varies based on who, and for what purpose, the region is considered. Additionally, the region has competing meanings for residents, and thus a speaker's attachment to place (rootedness) is discussed. A brief discussion of phonological variation, focusing primarily on the Central and Southern subregions follows. Grammatical variation, primarily among verbs, continues. The entry concludes with a discussion of lexicon and areas for further research.
Canadian English phonology is described in a comparative framework, emphasizing both North American English features shared with many varieties of American English, like /r/ constriction, the lack of a trap – bath split, the palm = lot merger, flapping of /t/ and palatal glide loss, and distinctively Canadian features, like Canadian Raising of price and mouth , the Low‐Back Merger of lot and thought , the Low‐Back‐Merger Shift (or Canadian Shift) of kit , dress, and trap , BAG‐raising ( trap before voiced velar consonants), and the traditional preference for trap over palm / lot in the nativization of foreign (a) words ( lava , pasta ). Both foundational and current research on these variables from several traditions is reviewed, including dialect surveys, articulatory or auditory‐impressionistic phonetic studies, and acoustic sociophonetics.
The merger of lot and thought, sometimes called the low-back merger, is a feature rapidly spreading across North America, even in locales historically resistant to the merger. New Orleans English has historically retained the lot/thought distinction due to raised thought, a feature more common to the mid-Atlantic region than the American South. In this study, we examine the relationship between lot and thought in a sample of fifty-seven speakers from the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette. We demonstrate that while some speakers in our sample retain phonemically distinct lot and thought, yet others demonstrate merged distributions of these low-back vowels. Using Euclidean distance measures, Bhattacharyya affinities, and modeling F1 and F2 values for lot and thought, we demonstrate a clear change in progress toward merger within New Orleans English, in apparent time. We observe two paths to merger in our dataset: women feature statistically significant lowering of thought over time in combination with lot backing, while for men the merger is mostly driven by lot backing. Progress toward the merger is most advanced in environments preceding /l/, with thought lower and fronter and lot backer preceding /l/. We note that this apparent-time evidence of progress toward a low-back merger places New Orleans English in the ranks of other Southern cities in the US demonstrating evidence of low-back merger, thereby neutralizing one of the key distinctions between New Orleans and surrounding dialects of English in the South.
This study aims, on the one hand, at the relationship between lectal variations of the Persian language and, on the other hand, Standard Persian, Shirazi, and Regional varieties, regarding the sociolinguistic situation in Fars Province: what is the social status of these varieties among Fars Province residents? What are the impacts of Regional lectals on the attitudes that form judgments about speakers' identity and character? The methodology of this research comprises the survey method, MGT and interview. The studied communities include Shiraz, Marvdasht, Kazeroon, Fasa, Jahrom, and several smaller cities near Shiraz. To collect data, a total of 490 participants contributed. The results indicate that regional varieties are dominant in the circle of family and friends to show solidarity and loyalty with their lectals. In education, the workplace, the streets, the media, and elite speech, Standard lectal signifies power, prestige, and social status.
Discussions of sociolinguistic awareness are often about how patterns observed in one practice (often linguistic production) appear in others (often person perception or metalinguistic commentary). Models like Labov's indicator/marker/stereotype trichotomy force this complexity into a single dimension, due to presupposing a conscious/unconscious distinction unsupported in current cognitive psychology. A more effective approach takes a theoretical step back, asking basic questions about how analogous sociolinguistic meanings relate across activities. In this article, I do so by asking whether explicit verbal reports and speaker evaluations of accentedness in Ohio correlate in strength across individual language users. Such a correlation would suggest a shared representation and/or a shared learning process. A total of 1106 participants listened to Ohio talkers reading word lists of trap , dress , lot , or goose tokens. Participants rated each talker's accentedness, then the accentedness of seven Ohio places. The expected main effects emerged: southern and rural Ohio were most accented, then northern Ohio, and lastly cities and central Ohio. Likewise, the acoustic features influenced talker ratings. Crucially, however, these two effects largely did not interact: those most likely to describe northern (southern) Ohio as accented were no more or less sensitive to northern (southern) vowel features. These results support the small but growing evidence that indexical relationships are learned and used independently across linguistic practices. They also move us further from a unidimensional model of awareness toward an approach where different systems are treated independently.
This paper examines folk perceptions of language in the Greater Boston Area. In particular, it seeks to understand which areas are associated with a “Boston” accent, and whether associations are changing given recent shifts in ethnic and economic demographics. A total of 111 Greater Boston residents completed a survey and map task asking what constitutes a “Boston” accent, who has one, and in which areas one can be heard. Results show that the majority of participants perceive the neighborhood of South Boston to be the geographic epicenter of the “Boston” accent, and generally associate accents with historically White working-class areas, despite sometimes changing demographics within them. There is also evidence that participant ethnic background may play a role in perceptions of speech in some areas, with White men less likely to choose South Boston, widely viewed as gentrifying, as accented, and Black and Asian participants less likely to choose the increasingly ethnically diverse neighborhood of North Dorchester. These results demonstrate the importance of eliciting folk perceptions from residents of color to obtain a fuller picture of the language attitudes in a given community.
This study explores some consonantal and vowel features of the variety of American English spoken in Dearborn, MI. Recent research shows that Dearborners recognize their English variety as distinct. Past studies on Dearborn English have primarily focused on vowel patterns, while some emerging sociolinguistic work has paid attention to the consonantal features. The present study contributes to this emerging literature by presenting a preliminary analysis of some consonantal features of Dearborn English in addition to a description of its vowel pattern. To do so, the speech of MENA Americans in Dearborn has been compared to that of non-Dearborner MENA Americans from the US Upper Midwest. The results show that pre-vocalic word-final /t/ glottalization, convergence of voice onset time of lenis and fortis members of bilabial and velar stops, shorter Euclidean distances for vowels, and a vowel pattern not consistent with local patterns could be parts of an ethnolinguistic repertoire for Dearborners.
The objective of this research was to analyse the articulatory movements linked with the mid-sagittal plane in Australian English /l/. For this purpose, the investigation employed the experimental paradigm introduced by Sproat and Fujimura (1993) as a methodological framework for analysis. The study involved monitoring the production of syllable-initial and -final /l/s in four distinct vowel environments (/æ/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/ and /u/) by six speakers, using three-dimensional electromagnetic articulography (3D EMA). The timing lag difference between the tongue tip (TT) and the tongue middle (TM) was measured, along with the lag between the tongue tip (TT) and the tongue back (TB). Results revealed that during the articulation of the alveolar lateral approximant /l/ in initial and final positions within syllables, the timing and coordination of tongue movements differ. The findings align with previous research on the articulation of lateral approximant /l/ in American-accented English. The temporal coordination between coronal (i.e., TT) and dorsal (i.e., TM/TB) articulatory movements would be influenced by syllable position. In syllable-initial /l/s, coronal and dorsal articulatory movements are nearly simultaneous, whereas in syllable-final /l/s, dorsal articulatory movement precedes the coronal articulatory movement. Regarding the vowel effect, we observed that the influence of vowels on timing differences is not consistent across all measurements. While adjacent vowels partly affected timing discrepancies, particularly in the tongue tip-to-middle (TT-TM) measurement in syllable-final positions, the tongue tip-to-back (TT-TB) measurement does not show the impact of surrounding vowels, except in the /æ/ vowel environment.
Place has been central to sociolinguistic research from the beginning. How speakers conceptualize and orient to place can influence linguistic productions. Additionally, places can and do have myriad meanings – some strongly contested. Further, place is not static, as people move and the ideologies regarding certain places evolve over time. This Element probes these themes. It begins by reviewing the existing work on language and place within sociolinguistics according to key themes in the literature – place orientation, gentrification, globalization, and commodification, amongst others. Then it introduces key concepts and frameworks for studying place within allied fields such as geography, sociology, architecture, and psychology. Each author then presents a case study of language and place within their respective field sites: rural Appalachia and Greater New Orleans. The authors end by identifying areas for future development of place theory within sociolinguistics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Examining regional variation across African American communities has advanced research on African American English beyond its treatment as a singular, uniform variety. While the earlier focus on inner-city, and often male, youth prioritized studying these speakers’ production of ethnolectal patterns, less attention was paid to other language practices of these speakers and their broader semiotic construction of identity. Drawing on ethnographic data and sociolinguistic interviews from African American speakers from Rochester, New York who identify as Hood Kids , I examine how the bought vowel can become a marker of a particular place-identity in Rochester. I argue that the Hood Kid is an adequation of an enregistered racialized NYC persona that reanalyzes bought while also drawing on other emblems of Black, street culture. Such variation suggests that speakers’ conceptualization of race and place ideologically scales beyond immediately local geographic boundaries. (African American Language, style, race and ethnicity, regional variation)*
This paper considers whether vowel systems are organized not only around principles of auditory-acoustic dispersion, but also around non-auditory perceptual factors, specifically vision. Three experiments examine variability in the production and perception of the cot-caught contrast among speakers from Chicago, where /ɑ/ (cot) and /ɔ/ (caught) have been influenced by the spread and reversal of the Northern Cities Shift. Dynamic acoustic and articulatory analysis shows that acoustic strength of the contrast is greatest for speakers with NCS-fronted cot, which is distinguished from caught by both tongue position and lip rounding. In hyperarticulated speech, and among younger speakers whose cot-caught contrast is acoustically weak due to retraction of cot, cot and caught tend to be distinguished through lip rounding alone. An audiovisual perception experiment demonstrates that visible lip gestures enhance perceptibility of the cot-caught contrast, such that visibly round variants of caught are perceptually more robust than unround variants. It is argued that articulatory strategies which are both auditorily and visually distinct may be preferred to those that are distinct in the auditory domain alone. Implications are considered for theories of hyperarticulation/clear speech, sound change, and the advancement of low back vowel merger in North American English.
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