Accent in North American Film and Television: A Sociophonetic Analysis
Abstract
Drawing on data from well-known actors in popular films and TV shows, this reference guide surveys the representation of accent in North American film and TV over eight decades. It analyzes the speech of 180 film and television performances from the 1930s to today, looking at how that speech has changed; how it reflects the regional backgrounds, gender, and ethnic ancestry of the actors; and how phonetic variation and change in the 'real world' have been both portrayed in, and possibly influenced by, film and television speech. It also clearly explains the technical concepts necessary for understanding the phonetic analysis of accents. Providing new insights into the role of language in the expression of North American cultural identity, this is essential reading for researchers and advanced students in linguistics, film, television and media studies, and North American studies, as well as the larger community interested in film and television.
... Some research from Canada, Scotland and Austria, however, does indicate that media can have an impact on language change (e.g. Boberg, 2000Boberg, , 2021Muhr, 2003, Stuart-Smith et al., 2013Stuart-Smith & Ota, 2014), but also on language attitude and linguistic stereotyping (Lippi-Green, 2012), which is particularly relevant to minority and minoritised languages. ...
From its early days, audiovisual translation has often been referred to as constrained translation. Skilled audiovisual translators try to find creative solutions to deal with these constraints, yet some might argue inevitably things get lost in translation. However, from a sociolinguistic point of view, there is also a lot to be gained from translation. Especially, in minority and smaller language areas that tend to rely more on imported foreign content. More recently, the emergence of several streaming platforms has started to change the audiovisual media landscape, as well as media consumption and audiovisual translation practices. These content providers are mostly large American companies and in smaller countries and regions they are often feared to flood international markets with their American content. Because of this, attempts have been made to protect local markets. Even at EU level, measures are in place to promote European audiovisual media. Importing foreign content can broaden the audience’s horizon, but the importance of making it accessible to a wide range of audiences with different linguistic preferences and special needs is often underestimated. As a result, some content providers fail to adequately assess the implications of neglecting smaller language areas and parts of their target audience. The impact of local audiovisual translation, including dubbing of both local and foreign animation, is often underestimated. In this article, audiovisual translation practice is discussed, explaining sociolinguistic implications focussing on language planning (De Ridder & O'Connell, 2018) and linguistic diversity (De Ridder, 2019; 2020) in audiovisual content. It aims to raise more awareness of the role audiovisual translation can play and calls for better regulation.
... Analysis of accent treatment in telecinematic artifacts as well as in online video clips (Boberg, 2021;Lippi-Green, 2012;Schneider, 2016) have pointed to the social connotations that are attached to different sociolect and dialectal varieties. It is suggested here that by developing activities aimed at engaging learners with different English varieties in movies and TV shows, teachers of English would further raise the learners' awareness of variation and bring them to question the stereotypical representations of the speakers of those varieties. ...
The Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) paradigm has recently emerged as a comprehensive approach that aims to bring together innovative pedagogical proposals. This paper argues that pop culture materials such as telecinematic representations can purposefully be integrated into innovative GELT-oriented classroom practices. The use of this material can assist teachers in the double task of (i) raising the learners’ critical awareness of sociolinguistic variation and problematizing the stereotypical image of monolithic English; (ii) shifting the focus of the ELT classroom from prescriptive grammar and standard English towards fostering the learners’ receptive and communicative skills. This is a conceptual paper that gives several broad suggestions as to how to adopt pop culture materials into innovative GELT-oriented classroom practice and mentions a select few examples of said telecinematic representations.
... Analysis of accent treatment in telecinematic artifacts as well as in online video clips (Boberg, 2021;Lippi-Green, 2012;Schneider, 2016) have pointed to the social connotations that are attached to different sociolect and dialectal varieties. It is suggested here that by developing activities aimed at engaging learners with different English varieties in movies and TV shows, teachers of English would further raise the learners' awareness of variation and bring them to question the stereotypical representations of the speakers of those varieties. ...
The Global Englishes Language Teaching (GELT) paradigm has recently emerged as a comprehensive approach that aims to bring together innovative pedagogical proposals. This paper argues that pop culture materials such as telecinematic representations can purposefully be integrated into innovative GELT-oriented classroom practices. The use of this material can assist teachers in the double task of (i) raising the learners’ critical awareness of sociolinguistic variation and problematizing the stereotypical image of monolithic English; (ii) shifting the focus of the ELT classroom from prescriptive grammar and standard English towards fostering the learners’ receptive and communicative skills. This is a conceptual paper that gives several broad suggestions as to how to adopt pop culture materials into innovative GELT-oriented classroom practice and mentions a select few examples of said telecinematic representations.
This paper examines the origin and historical development of the vowel system of Western Canadian English (WCE). It presents a sociophonetic analysis of interviews with two Western Canadian veterans of the First World War, born in 1890–91, and eight of the Second World War, born in 1917–1923. The data reveal that the comparative uniformity attributed to WCE today emerged gradually over the twentieth century. Initial English-speaking settlement, following the arrival of the railway in 1885 and continuing up to the Great Depression, produced a mix of features reflecting its diverse origins. Canadian Raising and a conservative variant of goat are uniform from the beginning, but the allophonic structure of short-a (trap-bath, including BAG-raising), the low-back merger, the marry-Mary and north-force mergers, fronting of goose and the Low-Back-Merger (or Canadian) Shift are all variable in the veterans’ speech. The sound changes that reduced that variation over the remainder of the twentieth century provide an accessible example of the convergence and levelling that have created new regional dialects from diverse migrant populations throughout history.
Over the last few years, we have witnessed the application of “corpus linguistic techniques” (Bednarek 2015) to the study of telecinematic language, which has resulted in the development of TV series corpora (Bednarek 2020, Davies 2021) for the systematic analysis of on-screen dialogue, defined as “the dialogue that the audience encounters when watching a TV episode. In terms of mode, such dialogue can be characterised as ‘THE SPEAKING OF WHAT IS WRITTEN TO BE SPOKEN AS IF NOT WRITTEN’” (Gregory 1967: 191, original capitalization, in Bednarek 2018: 9). However, when surveying the literature, it appears that TV series corpora are still most often approached on the written side (through scripts and subtitles), with research questions relating to morphosyntax, pragmatics or translation for example; and when they are approached on the spoken or multimodal side, seldom do researchers resort to phonetic-acoustic analyses of the accents spoken or the voices used (Gibson 2011, Habasque 2019, Boberg 2021), even when voices and accents are discussed from a sociolinguistic perspective (Gasquet-Cyrus & Planchenault 2019, LeFèvre-Berthelot 2020). So why are TV series not more commonly used as phonological corpora, when we consider that they correspond to Gut and Voorman’s definition (2014: 16)?This is what we offer to discuss here: first, in terms of what phonology does for fiction and to TV series, as far as geographical and historical anchoring (Viollain & Chatellier 2020), characterization (Lippi-Green 2012), and the representation and interpretation (encoding and decoding) of identities, communities and norms are concerned; then, in terms of what TV series do to phonology “in real life”, particularly phonological change (Stuart-Smith 2006) but also phonology as taught in the classroom, and how they challenge the field itself. We claim that TV series question its methods, the nature of its corpora (Viollain & Chatellier 2018), its purpose, and its relationship with other disciplines, namely fictolinguistics (Ferguson 1998), phonostylistics (Jobert 2018), corpus stylistics (McIntyre 2015) as well as perceptual dialectology, sociolinguistics, cognitive and psycholinguistics. We will detail some of the research avenues that TV series corpora open for phonologists and sociophoneticians and advocate their inclusion in research protocols aiming at building a large comparative database of speakers’ evaluations of their own or other accents, as another tool in the “large palette of techniques for exploring the phonological structures of given languages” (Durand 2017).
This chapter has thirteen sections: 1. General; 2. History of English Linguistics; 3. Phonetics and Phonology; 4. Morphology; 5. Syntax; 6. Semantics; 7. Lexicography, Lexicology, and Lexical Semantics; 8. Onomastics; 9. Dialectology and Sociolinguistics; 10. New Englishes and Creolistics; 11. Second Language Acquisition; 12. English as a Lingua Franca; 13. Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis. Sections 1 and 2 are by Viktorija Kostadinova; section 3 is by Marco Wiemann; sections 4 and 5 are by Gea Dreschler and Tamara Bouso; section 6 is by Beáta Gyuris; section 7 is by Ai Zhong; section 8 is by Maggie Scott; section 9 is by Lieselotte Anderwald; section 10 is by Wiebke Ahlers and Manuela Vida-Mannl; section 11 is by Kholoud A. Al-Thubaiti; section 12 is by Shawnea Sum Pok Ting, Ida Parise, and Alessia Cogo; section 13 is by Elisabeth Reber.
Longitudinal tracking of second dialect acquisition (SDA) normally requires carefully planned data collection and years of patience. However, the rise of self-recorded public speech data on internet archives such as YouTube affords researchers with a novel way of tracking language change over time. This paper presents two case studies of YouTube vloggers who have recorded their voices over the course of a decade (or longer) and have also relocated from different dialect regions of the United States to the West Coast. It reveals that, in addition to typical age-graded change such as a decrease in fundamental frequency over time, some vocalic aspects of their original dialects (Hawai’i English and Inland North English) shifted to become more in line with Western American English, while others did not. The disparity between the vowels that changed and those that did not for each speaker are discussed through the lenses of social salience, gender and race, and the audience design of YouTube vlogs.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s accent is often used as an illustration of the elite pronunciation heard among the north-eastern US upper classes until roughly the mid 20th century. Known under several names and often considered a mixture of British and American features, this variety is frequently identified with the American Theatre Standard, a norm popularized by acting schools in the early 20th century. Working on the assumption that Roosevelt is an exemplar of the north-eastern standard, the aim of the current study is a preliminary acoustic exploration of his accent with the aim of assessing the plausibility of such comparisons, focusing on the dress, trap, bath, start and lot vowels. Density plots created based on F1 and F2 measured in eight radio speeches were used to examine the relative position of these vowels in the vowel space. Linear mixed-effects regression was then used to model F1 and F2 in selected pairs of vowels to determine whether the differences along the two formant dimensions are significant. The results confirm a conclusion reached in an earlier auditory study (Brandenburg, Braden 1952) according to which Roosevelt’s bath was variable between [æ] and a lower and retracted [a], a vowel quality found in Eastern New England and in American Theatre Pronunciation. At the same time, a merged start/lot vowel in Roosevelt’s speech makes it unjustified to fully identify his accent with the latter variety.
The use of apparent time differences to study language change in progress has been a basic analytical construct in quantitative sociolinguistics for over 30 years. The basic assumption underlying the construct is that, unless there is evidence to the contrary, differences among generations of similar adults mirror actual diachronic developments in a language: the speech of each generation is assumed to reflect the language more or less as it existed at the time when that generation learned the language. In providing a mirror of real time change, apparent time forms the basis of a conceptual framework for exploring language change in progress. However, the basic assumptions that underlie apparent time have never been fully tested. This article tests those assumptions by comparing apparent time data from two recent random sample telephone surveys of Texas speech with real time data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, which was conducted some 15 years before the telephone surveys. The real time differences between the linguistic atlas data and the data from the telephone surveys provide strong support for the apparent time construct. Whenever apparent time data in the telephone surveys clearly suggest change in progress, the atlas data show substantially fewer innovative forms. Whenever the apparent time data suggest stable variation, the atlas data are virtually identical to that from the more recent surveys. Whenever the relationships between real and apparent time data are unclear, sorting out mitigating factors, such as nativity and subregional residence, clarifies and confirms the relationships. The results of our test of the apparent time construct suggest that it is unquestionably a valid and useful analytical tool.
The situation of sustained contact between Spanish and English in Miami during the past half century provides a rare opportunity to study contact-induced language change in an ecological context in which speakers of the immigrant language (i.e., Spanish) have become the numerical majority. The study reported here is designed to track the phonetic and prosodic influences of Spanish on the variety of English emerging among second-generation Miami-born Latinx speakers of various national origin backgrounds by examining a suite of variables shown in prior studies to exhibit Spanish substrate influence in other regional contexts. We examine two kinds of phonetic variables in the English spoken by 20 second-generation Latinx and 5 Anglo white speakers: (1) prosodic rhythm and (2) vowel quality. Prosodic rhythm was quantified using Low and Grabe’s Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI); results show that Miami-born Latinx speakers are significantly more syllable-timed in casual speech than Miami-born Anglo white speakers. Significant vocalic differences were also observed, with Latinx speakers producing lower and more backed tokens of [æ] in prenasal and nonprenasal positions and more backed tokens of [u].
How flexible is an individual’s accent during adulthood, and how does this flexibility re- late to longer-term change? Previous work has found that accents are remarkably flexible in conversational interaction, but predominantly stable over years, leading to very differ- ent views of the role of individuals in community-level sound change. This paper examines medium-term accent dynamics (days to months) by taking advantage of a ‘natural experi- ment’: a reality television show where contestants live in an isolated house for three months and are constantly recorded, forming a closed system where it is possible to both determine the dynamics of contestants’ speech from day to day and reason about the sources of any observed changes. We build statistical models to examine time dependence in five phonetic variables within individuals, in 14.5 hours of spontaneous speech from 12 English-speaking contestants. We find that time dependence in pronunciation is ubiquitous over the medium term: large daily fluctuations in pronunciation are the norm, while longer-term change over weeks to months occurs in a minority of cases. These patterns mirror the conflicting find- ings of previous work, and suggest a possible bridge between the two. We argue that time dependence in phonetic variables is influenced by contrast between sounds, as well as sys- tematic differences between speakers in how malleable their accent is over time; however, we find only limited evidence for convergence in individuals’ accents. Our results have implica- tions for theories of the role of individuals in sound change, and suggest that medium-term pronunciation dynamics are a fruitful direction for future work.
Accent is a potent cue to social categorization and stereotyping. An important agent of accent-based stereotype socialization is the media. The present study is the first quantitative content analysis to comprehensively examine accent portrayals on American primetime television. We focused our analysis on portrayals of Standard American (SA), Nonstandard American (NSA), Foreign-Anglo (FA), and Foreign-Other (FO) accents. Results provide clear evidence that American media's portrayals of different accents are biased, reflecting pervasive societal stereotypes. Whereas SA and FA speakers are over-represented on television, NSA and FO speakers are effectively
silenced
, by virtue of their sheer absence and gross under-representation. Moreover, when NSA and FO speakers do rarely appear on television, they tend to be portrayed less favorably on status-related traits and physical appearance than SA and FA speakers. These findings provide insight into the potential influence of media consumption on consumers’ social perceptions of different linguistic groups. (Accents, media, language attitudes, stereotypes, content analysis)*
We analyze a Big Data set of geo-tagged tweets for a year (Oct. 2013-Oct. 2014) to understand the regional linguistic variation in the U.S. Prior work on regional linguistic variations usually took a long time to collect data and focused on either rural or urban areas. Geo-tagged Twitter data offers an unprecedented database with rich linguistic representation of fine spatiotemporal resolution and continuity. From the one-year Twitter corpus, we extract lexical characteristics for twitter users by summarizing the frequencies of a set of lexical alternations that each user has used. We spatially aggregate and smooth each lexical characteristic to derive county-based linguistic variables, from which orthogonal dimensions are extracted using the principal component analysis (PCA). Finally a regionalization method is used to discover hierarchical dialect regions using the PCA components. The regionalization results reveal interesting linguistic regional variations in the U.S. The discovered regions not only confirm past research findings in the literature but also provide new insights and a more detailed understanding of very recent linguistic patterns in the U.S.
One of the best known and most controversial features of Canadian English is the vocalic feature labeled by Chambers (1973) as “Canadian Raising”, which affects the /aI/ of right and the /aU/ of lout . This feature represents a situation in which the onset of the diphthong is closer to the target of the glide before fortis consonants than before lenis consonants: for instance, ride may have [ a ε] and right [3I], and loud may have [ a o] but lout [ʌU]. Many of the previous studies of the feature, beginning with its original description by Martin Joos (1942), who raises the question of whether the second syllable of typewriter has the raised or non-raised variant, have involved the syllabification rules that determine when the onset is raised and when it is not. Chambers (1973) demonstrates that writer normally has the raised variant and shows that the relative stress on particular syllables can prevent raising from taking place in some cases where the diphthong occurs before a voiceless consonant. Vance (1987), Paradis (1980), and Chambers (1989) also deal with this latter problem, reformulating it in terms of linear (Vance) or Kahnian (Paradis, Chambers) theories of syllable formation.
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The boundary between the North and Midland dialects in Ohio represents an unusually clear opportunity to test how well dialect boundaries can persist. For part of this boundary, the original settlement by European Americans was strongly segregated: the area north of the line was heavily dominated by settlers from a hearth running from western New England through upstate New York, while the area south of it was dominated by settlers from a hearth comprising southern Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and northern Virginia and West Virginia. Recordings of Dictionary of American Regional English survey subjects, born 1880-1908, were compared with subjects, born 1970-94, from a new survey. A number of variables involving vowel quality or vowel mergers that are known or suspected to differentiate the North and Midland were analyzed in these subjects' speech. Eight variables showed statistically significant differences according to dialect region. When these variables were combined quantitatively, the patterns that emerged are that the North and Midland remain robustly differentiated but that a transition zone has developed along the boundary.
This paper examines several aspects of the “Short Front Vowel Shift” (SFVS) in Canadian English, known in most previous research as the “Canadian Vowel Shift.” It is based on acoustic analysis of a list of one hundred words produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American university students. The analysis focuses on three questions: (1) the relations among the vowels involved in the shift, including relations with vowels not traditionally considered part of the shift; (2) the behavior of individual words in each vowel category, which displays allophonic variation; and (3) the role of regional and national identity (western versus eastern Canadian, and Canadian versus American) and speaker sex in predicting the degree of participation in the shift, which is measured with a unitary quantitative index of the shift that is proposed here for the first time. The analysis finds that the short front vowels (kit, dress, and trap) lower and retract as a set, but that shifts of several back vowels (particularly foot, goat, and strut) are also correlated but not necessarily structurally connected with these; that following voiceless fricatives favor the SFVS while preceding velars disfavor it; that women are more advanced in the shift than men; that there is no regional difference within Canada in the progress of the shift; and, most surprisingly, that, once the American comparison group is restricted to those with a low-back merger, Americans are more shifted than their Canadian peers, calling into question the association of the shift with Canada in most previous research on Canadian English.
As a follow-up to an analysis of New York City English in film recently published in this journal (Boberg 2018), this article turns its attention to the whole country over the same 80-year period of 1930-2010, using acoustic phonetic, quantitative and statistical analysis to identify the most important changes in the pronunciation of North American English by 40 leading actresses in their best-known films. Focusing mostly on vowel production, the analysis reveals several important changes over the eight decades, reflecting a gradual shift from East Coast patterns rooted in the speech of New York City to West Coast patterns rooted in the speech of Los Angeles. The most obvious change, already identified in the New York City analysis, is in /r/ constriction: vocalization of /r/ is restricted almost entirely to the earlier period, before the mid-1960s. Turning to vocalic variables, the “low-back distinction” between /o/ and /oh/ (LOT and THOUGHT) declines, while a new distinction between /æ/ (TRAP) and its allophone before nasal consonants (e.g. ham or hand) emerges. Connected with these processes is a shift of /æ/ and /oh/ to a lower, more central position in the vowel space. Finally, the back-upgliding vowel /uw/ (GOOSE) shifts forward over time. These and other patterns correspond closely to those identified in the speech of ordinary people by Labov (1972) in New York City and by the Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006) in the rest of the continent, revealing an intriguing parallel between public speech in the mass media and private speech in local communities.
Previous research has shown that Canadian English displays a unique pattern of nativizing the stressed vowel of foreign words spelled with the letter , like lava, pasta, and spa, known as foreign (a), with more use of /æ/ (the trap vowel) and less use of /ah/ (the palm vowel) than American English. This paper analyzes one hundred examples of foreign (a), produced by sixty-one Canadian and thirty-one American English-speakers, in order to shed more light on this pattern and its current development. Acoustic analysis is used to determine whether each participant assigns each vowel to English /æ/, /ah/, or an intermediate category between /æ/ and /ah/. It reports that the Canadian pattern, though still distinct, is converging with the American pattern, in that Canadians now use slightly more /ah/ than /æ/; that men appear to lead this change but this is because they participate less than women do in the Short Front (Canadian) Vowel Shift; that intermediate vowel assignments are comparatively rare, suggesting that a new low-central vowel phoneme is not emerging; that the Canadian tendency toward American pronunciation is not well aligned with overt attitudes toward the United States and American English; and that the national differences in foreign (a) assignment result not from structural, phonological differences between the dialects so much as from a complex set of sociocultural factors.
This paper examines the apparent time evolution of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift among 42 White speakers in one Chicago community. We analyse quantitative patterns of community‐wide vocalic change alongside individual speakers’ lived experiences and attitudes. We find that some features of the Shift are dramatically reversing at the community level, and that changing demographics and social concerns across the community’s history condition which speakers are likely to advance or reverse the Shift. Although some have argued that regionalized sound change reversals reflect speakers’ increasing extra‐local orientations, in this community, we suggest that reversal reflects shifting definitions of racialized localness, including younger speakers’ orientation away from particular emblematic local personae that have become linked with the Shift. We argue that sound changes must be understood in their evolving local contexts, as they can be driven by shifts in the social meanings attached to place‐linked features and in definitions of localness.
Prior research documents /æ/ raising and tensing when followed by /g/ in words like bag in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in Seattle. The present study compares /æg/ raising among speakers from Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia, and explores the social motivations for its use. The findings show that while the feature occurs in both cities, its social distribution is not identical. Different age and gender distributions and varying metalinguistic commentary raise questions about the trajectory of change in each city. Nonetheless, speakers’ realizations of raised bag are associated with similar sociocultural backgrounds and ideologies. In Seattle, bag raisers have multigenerational ties to the area, take strong ideological stances against changes in the area’s industries and economy, and oppose “gentrification.” Nonraisers have more international ties, show stronger interest in moving elsewhere, and embrace Seattle’s new industries. In Vancouver, BAG raisers describe growing up as Caucasian Canadians in majority Asian neighborhoods and emphasize the changing demographics and increased cost of living. In both cities, bag raisers are ideologically opposed to perceived encroachment and take conservative stances toward changes in their city. This highlights that the West and Canada participate in some of the same sound changes and show similar, locally contextualized motivations for their use.
This study investigates the low back vowel merger (lot-thought merger) of African American and European American speakers in Washington DC. The study aims to follow up with the previous investigation by Labov et al. (2006) on low back merger in DC, and investigate whether African American speakers in DC are participating in the merger, one of the majority-led sound changes. The study also examines the difference in low back vowel production between African Americans from a particular quadrant of the city, namely, Southeast (SE), and those from elsewhere in DC. Data are taken from forty sociolinguistic interviews with natives of DC. The vowels were analyzed acoustically, taking F1 and F2 measurements at three different points of a vowel. Both the F1 and the F2 dimensions of the low back vowels and the degree of overlap were examined. The degree of overlap was measured by calculating the Pillai score for each speaker, with duration and following environment taken into account. Results indicate that DC is conservatively participating in the merger, with European American speakers exhibiting higher degrees of overlap than African American speakers. An age effect is also observed, but only among African American speakers who are not from SE. The study further argues that the participation in the mainstream sound change by some African Americans can also be analyzed as convergence to the local white norm, and that this convergence is more likely to be carried out by African American speakers who are not from SE, a section of the city in which the contact between African American speakers and European American speakers is minimal.
This article analyzes the frequency of three traditional features of New York City English-vocalized /r/, raised tense /áh/ (bath), and raised tense /oh/ (thought)-in the on-screen speech of 22 actors raised in the greater New York City region, in a diachronic selection of films that appeared between 1933 and 2003. Vocalization of /r/ is coded impressionistically as either present or absent; the vocalic variables are subjected to acoustic analysis. The resulting data show that the prevalence of New York City features in the actors' speech closely parallels that identified in both historical accounts of New York City English and more recent sociolinguistic studies of the speech of ordinary people. The data also correspond well with previous research on nonfilm speech in showing a decline in the frequency of traditional variants starting in the 1960s, at least for some speakers. Sociolinguistic analysis of more recent films and characters indicates a shifting social evaluation of traditional New York City English. This underlies a divergence between speakers who continue to use traditional dialect features, which now have exclusively covert, local prestige, and those who converge with nonlocal speech norms, which carry overt, global prestige.
Southern varieties of English are known to be affected by the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS), which alters the positional relationship between the front tense/ lax system. However, previous work on the SVS generally limits its focus to steady state formant measures. Possible links between these shifts and dynamic trajectory distinctions have largely been unexplored despite widespread recognition that Southern vowels are dynamic in nature. The current article uses data from three Southern states (Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia) to ask to what extent does spectral onset position (the typical measure of SVS participation) correlate with internal spectral dynamics in the SVS. Analysis methods include a series of spectral measures (vector length, trajectory length, spectral rate of change and vector angle), which capture vowel inherent dynamics and vowel directionality. Results support the utility of looking at dynamic measures to better understand the fuller extent of vowel changes that occur with the SVS and lend support to recent calls to include nonstatic measures in sociophonetic analyses more generally.
The literature on Canadian English provides evidence of distinct dialect regions. Within this landscape, the province of British Columbia is set apart as a sub-region in the west, yet information concerning “local” English is notably skewed toward a single urban setting, Vancouver. To assess and extend the generalizability of prior observations, this paper targets the city of Victoria and situates the results from a large-scale sociolinguistic investigation within the model of the typical (western) Canadian city presented in Boberg (2008, 2010). We consider vocalic features characterized as either General Canadian or distinctively Western Canadian. We also consider “yod” (i.e., the presence of an onglide in student, tune, and the like), a conservative feature that is obsolescing across the nation. Our results support Boberg’s (2008, 2010) observations while positioning Victoria as both innovative—participating in national changes—and conservative—joining certain changes relatively recently and retaining older dialect features. Such results enable us to trace leveling to national and more local dialect patterns, while also reminding us of sociohistorical forces in the formation of dialects.
1. In the studies of Canadian English which have appeared up to date, emphasis has largely been placed been on the social-historical factors which account for the distribution of different groups of English-speaking settlers. This work, of course, provides an indispensable basis for further linguistic investigations, and equally useful are the lexical distributions that have been studied. In the phonological field, however, there is an urgent need for more material based on first-hand phonetic observation.
2. The present article sets out to analyse phonetically the English spoken in the Vancouver area, specifically among the younger generation. Some fifty local students, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-two, have co-operated in this exploratory analysis during the last two years, and the detailed investigation of their speech has been supplemented and checked by further investigation outside the group.
1. In the last issue of the JCLA (March 1957) I made a tentative phonetic analysis of the English spoken by the younger generation in the Vancouver area. On the basis of that analysis I propose in this article to go on to the examination of one of the problems that face us in the phonemic classification of the Vancouver vowels.
2. I should like to stress from the beginning that this problem is distributional, for whatever our views on the nature of the phoneme — whether we regard it as a concrete, practical unit, useful in the description of languages and dialects known or hitherto unknown, or whether we consider it as an abstract Platonic idea whose translation to the real world involves a series of Protean adaptations or adjustments to the phonological environment — in either case, the most important factor to be considered is distribution.
Not long ago a Torontonian shopping in a large department store just across the border asked where he could find chesterfields. On following directions, he was somewhat dismayed to find himself at the cigar counter!
Such experiences often occur in life along the border, as any Ontarioan who has tried to buy blinds or serviettes in New York or Michigan will know. When he has been across the line for some time, however, he discovers that most of his neighbours pull down their shades before retiring and tuck in their table napkins before eating spaghetti Italian style. The visitor from Ontario who stays with American friends just south of the line learns that they turn on faucets at the kitchen sink rather than taps and hold up their pants with suspenders , not braces ( trousers is “elegant diction” for most men in both countries.)
This study provides the first wide-scale, apparent time, instrumental description of the Canadian Shift in mainstream Toronto English. In contrast with some previous findings, the Toronto data suggest that for the last 70 years or more the shift has not affected the high front lax vowel (i). We observe that the movement of the nonhigh front lax vowels (ε) and (æ) involves both lowering and retraction in Toronto English, although retraction is the primary direction of more recent change and the shift appears to be slowing down. Our findings also suggest that continued retraction of the vowel resulting from the low back merger is involved in the final stage of the shift. We do not find evidence of a chain shift but instead propose that a parallel shift is occurring and make reference to Vowel Dispersion Theory in our discussion.
Canadian Raising, which makes allophonic variants of the low diphthongs /ai/ and /au/, is evaluated with respect to its diachronic, geographic, and synchronic status. Its origins have been established by documentary evidence from 1934. However, comparative dialect evidence from the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada pushes the origins back to the second half of the 19th century. Raising of /ai/ in the northern United States turns out to be different from Canadian Raising, though they overlap. Sociolinguistic studies of (aw)-Fronting in 1980 showed a tendency for fronted onsets to be unraised. Though this was statistically insignificant, any strengthening would threaten the existence of Canadian Raising. Subsequent research shows that the tendency was accidental.
This article reports on a study of ethnic variation in the phonetics of Montreal English. The speech of 93 native speakers of Montreal English from three ethnic groups, British-Irish, Italian and Jewish, was recorded and subjected to acoustic analysis. Several statistically significant differences among the ethnic groups were identified. The present paper undertakes an apparent-time analysis of these differences, to see whether they are getting smaller over time, as might be expected under the assumption that post-immigrant generations gradually assimilate to the linguistic and cultural patterns of their adopted homelands. While Jewish Montrealers show some signs of convergence with the British-origin standard, Italians — especially young Italian men—appear to be diverging from that model. It is suggested that the unusual persistence and even intensification of ethno-phonetic variation in English-speaking Montreal reflects both the residential and social self-segregation of its ethnic communities and the local dominance of French.
General properties of the Canadian English vowel space are derived from an experimental-acoustic study of vowel production underway in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Comparing the preliminary Winnipeg results with similar data from General American English confirms previously described generalizations for Canadian English: the merger of low-back vowels, the relative retraction of /æ/, and the relative advancement of /u/ and /Ʊ/. However, a similar comparison of the Winnipeg sample with comparable Southern California data disputes the accuracy of the claim that Canadian Shift (Clarke et al. 1995) is a feature of ‘general’ Canadian and Californian English. An acoustic analysis uncovers subtle phonetic distinctions that make possible a more precise characterization of Canadian Raising: rather than only adjusting the height of the nucleus, Winnipeg speakers produce a directional shift in both the nucleus and offglide of the diphthongs /aɪ, aƱ/; this process applies to all three diphthongs (including /oɪ/).
The unconditioned merger of the low back vowels and the variety of realizations found for the low front vowel have been noted as leading to greater distinctiveness across U.S. English regional dialects. The extent to which the movements of these vowels are related has repeatedly been of interest to dialectology as well as phonological theory. Here, examining production and perception data from speaker-listeners across three major regions of the United States, the relationships among these low vowels within and across regions are investigated. Participants provided speech samples and took part in a vowel identification task, judging vowels along a continuum from /æ/ to /ɑ/. Results of acoustic analysis and statistical analysis of the perception results indicate that a structural relationship between /æ/ and /ɑ/ is maintained across regions and that listeners’ own degree of low back vowel merger predicts their perception of the boundary between /æ/ and /ɑ/.
In a somewhat condescending review of A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles some years ago, Mavor Moore complained about “a slighting of spoken practice and of distinctive Canadian syntax,” among his objections being the absence of an entry for eh? , for “both the English and the Americans can spot a Canadian from his ‘eh?’ at the end of a sentence: ‘It’s hot, eh?’” Admittedly, the interjection is not in the DC ; moreover, there are no slips for eh? in the citation files of the Lexicographical Centre for Canadian English. This situation certainly indicates that the readers for the DC did not consider it a Canadianism: either that or they were unaware that eh? might be relevant to the collection.
The second of these possibilities may be set aside, for eh? is, in fact, entered in the Intermediate Dictionary and the Senior Dictionary , general dictionaries of English published in Canada for Canadians as part of the Dictionary of Canadian English series, to which the DC belongs. It should be added that eh? is also entered in every general dictionary of English, both British and American, on my shelves—a very considerable collection indeed, and one which includes the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s New International Dictionary (Third Edition).
This paper investigates interspeaker variation in the mid and low short vowels of Jewish Montreal English, analyzing the Canadian Shift in both production and perception. In production, we find that young women are leading in the retraction of /æ/ and the lowering and retraction of /ε/. We furthermore find that across speakers, the retraction of /æ/ is correlated with the lowering and retraction of /ε/, providing quantitative evidence that the movements of these two vowels are linked. The trajectory implied by our production data differs from what was reported in Montreal approximately one generation earlier. In contrast to reliable age differences in production, a vowel categorization task shows widespread intergenerational agreement in perception, highlighting a mismatch: in this speech community, there is evidently more systematic variation in production than in perception. We suggest that this is because all individuals are exposed to both innovative and conservative variants and must perceptually accommodate accordingly.
In many Native American and Canadian First Nations communities, indigenous languages are important for the linguistic construction of ethnic identity. But because many younger speakers have limited access to their heritage languages, English may have an even more important role in identity construction than Native languages do. Prior literature shows distinctive local English features in particular tribes. Our study builds on this knowledge but takes a wider perspective: We hypothesize that certain features are shared across much larger distances, particularly prosody. Native cultural insiders (the first two co-authors) had a central role in this project. Our recordings of seventy-five speakers in three deliberately diverse locations (Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, North/South Dakota; Northwest Territories, Canada; and diverse tribes represented at Dartmouth College) show that speakers are heteroglossically performing prosodic features to index Native ethnic identity. They have taken a ‘foreign’ language (English) and enregistered these prosodic features, creatively producing and reproducing a shared ethnic identity across great distances. (Native Americans, prosody, ethnicity, ethnic identity, English, dialects)*
The conventional wisdom regarding the diachronic process whereby phonetic phenomena become phonologized appears to be the ‘error accumulation’ model, so called by Baker, Archangeli, and Mielke (2011). Under this model, biases in the phonetic context result in production or perception errors, which are misapprehended by listeners as target productions, and over time accumulate into new target productions. In this article, I explore the predictions of the hypocorrection model for one phonetic change (prevoiceless /ay/-raising) in detail. I argue that properties of the phonetic context underpredict and mischaracterize the contextual conditioning on this phonetic change. Rather, it appears that categorical, phonological conditioning is present from the very onset of this change.
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 117-128
This paper analyses the linguistic construction of the televisual character Sheldon - the 'main nerd' in the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007-), approaching this construction of character through both computerised and 'manual' linguistic analysis. More specifically, a computer analysis of dialogue (using concordances and keyword analysis) in series 1 of The Big Bang Theory provides insights into how Sheldon is constructed through both explicit and implicit cues in his own and others' dialogue, drawing on shared stereotypes of 'nerdiness'. This corpus linguistic analysis is complemented through manual, 'scene-based analysis' of implicit cues in dialogue between Sheldon and Penny, drawing on (im)politeness theory. Previous analyses of film and TV dialogue have shown how linguistic deviance, e.g. in terms of politeness, can construct characters as somehow 'anti-social', 'abnormal', 'rude' or 'not quite human'. The analysis of Sheldon's repertoire provides insights into how and when linguistic deviance constructs nerdiness in contrast to other social identities. This allows us to consider which factors lead to viewers' perception of characters as threateningly abnormal or funnily abnormal or somehow non-human or indeed as other social identities. The analyses also show how dialogue projects a particular social identity drawing on stereotypes and shared knowledge with the audience.
Sociolinguistic styles tie linguistic resources together into clusters and link them to social contexts of times, groups, places, and activities. Perceptions of masculinity and sexual orientation represent a well-studied area on sociolinguistic perception, offering many variables with potentially relevant social meanings. This study examines social perceptions of guises created by intersecting three masculinity- relevant variables: pitch, /s/-fronting or backing, and (ING). First, 110 online respondents provided descriptions and naturalness ratings of speech samples that were digitially modified to include the different variants; next, 175 respondents rated the speakers on six-point scales based on the terms "smart," "knowledgeable," "masculine," "gay," "friendly," "laid-back," "country," "educated," and "confident." The results showed that /s/-fronting carries strong social meaning across multiple speakers and other linguistic cues, making speakers sound less masculine, more gay and less competent. As documented elsewhere, use of the (ING) variants -ing and -in made speakers sound more or less competent, respectively. The combination of /s/-fronting and (ING), and, independently, /s/-backing, showed more complex effects, shifting relationships between multiple percepts. Taken together, these results provide some support for style-based sociolinguistic models, but also underline the need for more sophisticated statistical treatments of covariation in social perception.
A shift of contemporary sociolinguistic research towards media and pop cultural discourse has been observed (e.g. Lopez, 2009; Meek, 2006). Despite the proliferation of studies, there has not been a systematic attempt to chart this field of research. In the light of this, in the present article I review research on the representations of sociolinguistic style in TV and film fictional discourse. The review reveals that although the epistemology of social construction has privileged the analysis of fictional data, the paradigm upon which most of the reviewed studies have drawn remains a traditional one. Similarly, a view of fiction as a reflection of sociolinguistic style is still a dominant conceptual framework from which many researchers tend to interpret their analyses. In conclusion, it is suggested that this research strand tends to confirm the ‘artificiality’ of fiction, by eventually sustaining the ideology of sociolinguistic authenticity.
This Paper discusses a particular phonological rule that occurs in several English dialects, including Canadian English. The rule will be referred to throughout as ‘Canadian Raising’ purely for mnemonic purposes; no geographical rigour is intended by the epithet ‘Canadian’—a point that is made abundantly clear in §4, where the distribution of the rule is taken up. The appropriateness of the term resides in the relative role the rule plays in Canadian English, where its effect is the most readily identifiable trait of the dialect. Thus, speakers of Canadian English are often identified by the speakers of adjoining dialects by their pronunciation of words like wife and south , which are usually mis-heard by speakers of General American as weef and sooth .
The main facts about Canadian Raising were first organized systematically three decades ago by Martin Joos, in a short article entitled “A phonological dilemma in Canadian English” (1942). Since then, they have been cursorily referred to in the literature several times (for example: Bloomfield 1948: 62; McDavid 1963: 470, etc.) and have been reorganized in a different theoretical framework (Halle 1962: 343) with no augmentation—and usually a simplification—of Joos’s observations.
The interaction between intonational patterns and speaker gender has long been noted in the language and gender literature (e.g., Brend 1972, Lakoff 1975, McConnell-Ginet 1983, Ohara 1992). It has also been hypothesized (Moonwomon 1985, Queen 1997) that intonation may be a locus of difference between lesbian and heterosexual women's speech. This paper investigates the question of whether there is an interaction between pitch range and sexual orientation in women. An experiment was carried out in San Francisco in which 24 lesbians and straight women were individually audiotaped recounting the plot of the movie The Wizard of Oz. Data are thus controlled as much as possible for content and communicative situation, while remaining as natural speech. Acoustic analysis of the recordings suggests that pitch range is not a distinguishing factor for female sexual orientation.
This paper investigates the effect of persona-based information on implicit linguistic perceptions of a sociolinguistic feature – the backed trap vowel. trap-backing is associated both with macro-social region (California) and with a particular persona that inhabits this region (the Valley Girl). An eye-tracking paradigm is used to examine these associations in early, automatic stages of perception. One group of listeners was told the speaker was from California, while another group was told that the speaker had been described as a Valley Girl. Findings demonstrate that both the California information and the Valley Girl information caused listeners to expect the speaker to exhibit trap-backing. While previous studies have highlighted the influence of macro-sociological categories on linguistic perception, the present study suggests that persona-based social meanings can also serve to influence perception, supporting theories that foreground personae as social constructs crucial to interaction.
Miles Laurence Hanley (1893–1954) served on the English faculty of the University of Wisconsin from 1927 to his untimely death. During the early 1930s, Hanley took a two-year leave from his teaching duties at the University of Wisconsin to work as the associate director of the Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE) under the direction of Hans Kurath. As part of his duties, Hanley recorded LANE speakers, as well as facilitating the recording of LANE speakers by others. In 1984, the recordings were donated to the Library of Congress. Motivation for linguists to explore this set of recordings is two-fold. First, the Hanley recordings provide critical insight on field recordings during the earlier part of the twentieth century and can even inform our understanding of the technological milieu at that time. Second, the Hanley recordings represent the contrast between insurance recordings of dialect of older, rural speakers and more recent recordings where the focus shifts to the recordings of younger, urban speakers, as well as the shift from the lexical questionnaire as primary data tool to audio recordings. The discussion includes an evaluation of the quality of audio recordings.
Few studies have examined the vowel systems of communities that border areas characterized by the Northern Cities Shift and the low back vowel merger, two sound changes currently shaping North American English. Using data from 40 respondents in greater Eau Claire, in northwestern Wisconsin, we examine the behavior of the low vowels/æ, α,/and consider the relationships among their arrangements and these sound changes. We find advanced/æ/- raising before/g/, moderate/æ/-raising in other environments, little to no/α/-fronting, and the low back vowel merger in progress. The findings challenge the assumption that/æ/-raising and the low back vowel merger are unlikely to co-occur. In addition, the patterns of/æ/-raising, for example, that/æ/-raising before/g/is not undergoing change and/æ/-raising in other environments may be receding, raise interesting questions about the relationship between/æ/-raising in northwestern Wisconsin and the Northern Cities Shift. Although/æ/-raising seems to precede the low back vowel merger in northwestern Wisconsin, the pressure of the low back vowel merger is intensifying due to geographic and social connections between northwestern Wisconsin and Minnesota.
This study investigates selected English sounds spoken by immigrants in a region of the United States undergoing vowel space restructuring. The vowels of Hmong Americans in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area are compared to those of local white middle-class speakers. Results of this comparison suggest that young white speakers produce a fronted bat vowel and a lowered and backed bet. Males reduce the mean BOT-BOUGHT spectral distance, leaving the impression of an apparent merger. Younger Hmong Americans who arrived in the United States at a young age accommodate to local norms for bat fronting and raising but not to the apparent low-back merger, regardless of speaker age, sex, generation, or social mobility.