Please join us for a meeting of the Language Variation & Change workshop, this Friday, March 1 at 3:30pm, in Rosenwald 301. This workshop coincides with our prospective student visit. A reception will follow.
Who owns the local sound change?
Sharese King, UChicago
Recent work has illustrated considerable regional variation across and within African Americans’ speech communities (Yaeger Dror & Thomas 2010; Wolfram 2007, 2015; Wolfram & Kohn 2015). Observations of regional diversity have come by way of analyses assessing African Americans’ participation in regional sound changes, but these analyses have tended to focus on southern and northern communities. Studies of vocalic variation in western African American communities, especially non-urban areas, remain relatively scant.
This paper examines the vocalic behavior of African Americans in Bakersfield, California, an inland community located south of the state, outside of Los Angeles. The African American community in Bakersfield is much less dense and centralized than the communities found in larger urban areas, with African American Bakersfieldians being dispersed throughout a wider community that is predominantly White. Given that these individuals are situated in a regional context in which the California Vowel Shift (CVS) is exhibited (D’Onofrio 2015; Eckert 2008; Hagiwara 1997; Kennedy & Grama 2012; Podesva et al. 2015), this study investigates the effects of the CVS on the regional variety of African American English (AAE) by focusing on the production vowels with distinct patterns in the CVS and the African American Vowel Shift (Thomas 2007): BAT lowering and retraction, BOOT-, TOO-, and POOL-fronting; and the overlap of LOT–THOUGHT.
The data come from sociolinguistic interviews with 12 Black Bakersfieldians (6 men, 6 women), and 18 White Bakersfieldians (9 women, 9 men). Interviews were transcribed and force-aligned using FAVE aligner, and formant measurements for each vowel token were extracted via Praat script. The results show that while African Americans have taken up some regional patterns (BAT lowering & retraction; BOOT-, TOO-, POOL-fronting), they have rejected others (LOT–THOUGHT merger). Taken together, this suggests that African American Bakersfieldians’ construction of identities can draw on locally-available linguistic resources, prompting us to reconsider the ways in which we define who are users of local sound changes and how the local context gives rise to particular patterns of production among this community of speakers.