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Today: Accents and Dialects of US English
This hour:
What is a dialect? An accent? What contributes to a listener's perception of
accented speech? From lexical to phonological atlases: American
dialectology What phonological differences may be observed
between dialects of US English?Key term:Isogloss: a graphical representation marking the distributional limits of lexical items or linguistic forms (sometimes the area associated with a linguistic form)
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What is a dialect?…an accent?
Dialect--a local form of "a language”; often associated with a particular region (regional dialect) or subsection of a larger language community (sociolect).
--regionally or socially distinctive
--vary in relatively minor aspects of their pronunciation (“accent”), vocabulary and grammar (how words are combined into sentences)
… Similar techniques for diagnosing dialects may be used for all languages
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Traditional Dialectology
Aims:1. Provide a historical record of the
language2. Show areal distribution of unique
linguistic features3. Not concerned with representing the
speech of the community
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Traditional Dialectology
Method:1. Administer a dialect survey targeting specific lexical
items, pronunciations (diagnostic forms)2. Collect data from representative community members, called
NORMs3. Typically, sampling was done by relying on population
density
Lines indicating the distributional limits of lexical items or linguistic forms are called isoglosses.
Focus:1. Lexical 2. Grammatical3. Phonological
Two recent subfields of sociolinguistics in which dialect descriptions are now accomplished:
Sociophonetics -- Instrumental phonetics supplements auditory phonetic and phonological analysis
Urban Dialectology -- Utilizes updated lexical-cartographic methods (TELSUR)
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Diagnosing Dialect Differences
Phonological differences. For the most part, the features that distinguish us from people in other parts of the country are our vowels!
-- Vowels (a, e, i, o, u, ai, oi, ei, au)-- Consonants (r, t, d, th)
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Diagnosing Dialect Differences
Region Phonological Lexical Morpho-syntactic
New England
(oh)
(r)-deletion
“Boston” “car”
“gumband” vs.
“rubberband”
Upper North
Northern Vowel Shift
e.g., (oh)
(ae)-tensing
“coffee”
“bad”
“pop” vs. “soda”
Lower North
Southern Vowel Shift
e.g., short-(e) short-(i)
(s)-vocalization
Diphthongiza-tion, e.g. “bed”, “bid”; ”greasy”
“I heard it whenever that I was watching
TV.”
Upper South
(ay)-monophthon
gization
“bright” “veranda” vs.
“porch”
“The car needs ø washed.”
Lower South
(ay)-monophthon
gization
“bright”
Northwest (r)-insertion “warsh”
Southwest (a~oh) merger
“cot” = “caught”
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Northern Cities and Southern Cities Vowel Shifts (Labov, 1991)
i˘
e˘
I
E
Qa
ç
√
o˘U
u˘
•key characteristics: fronting of (a), tensing and raising of (ae), backing of short (e,i), lowering of (oh) in W New England, N PA, N OH, IN, IL, MI, WI (Buffalo, Chicago)
•traditionally tense (long) vowels and /U/ are unaffected•lax subsystem is moving•ordering of elements via “push” and “drag” chains somewhat controversial
(iy) beat
(i) bit
(ey) beat
(e) bet
(ae) bat
(o) bottle, father
(uw) boot
(u) book
(ow) boat
(uh) but
(oh) ball, caught
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Northern Cities and Southern Cities Vowel Shifts (Labov, 1991)
i˘
e˘
I
E
Qa
ç
√
o˘U
u˘
•key characteristics: fronting of long back vowels (uw), (ow), upward rotation and development of inglides in short (e,i) while long (ey,iy) rotate back and downward in all of the US South
•both shifts are viewed as related (and separate from a third pattern, associated with the merger of (oh-a) ).
(iy) beat
(i) bit
(ey) beat
(e) bet
(ae) bat
(o) bottle, father
(uw) boot
(u) book
(ow) boat
(uh) but
(oh) ball, caught
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In the recent news...
Detroit vowels:http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels.html
New Orleans:Dislocated family resettling in Seattle:http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kplu/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=881425“other” (th)-stopping“crying” (ay)“chicken,” “fish” short-(i)
Buffalo (Donald Herbert story):http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5227036&ft=1&f=1001“Don” (a)-fronting “father”(a)-fronting
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The new attention to phonology:Representing Dialect Speech
Method:1. International phonetic alphabet (IPA):
Traditional dialectology
2. Auditory analysis: Traditional dialectology and Sociolinguistics
3. Instrumental analysis: Sociophonetics