Early trends in a newly developing variety of english

Abstract

During the nineteenth century, English-speaking natives of Utah exhibited variation in three phonological variables (among others): the cot-caught merger, the cord-card merger, and //ai//-monophthongization. Based on an analysis of audio recordings of twenty-six natives of Utah born during the nineteenth century, changes in these variables over apparent time are tracked. The analysis finds a trend toward completion of the two mergers and increased /ai/-monophthongization. This is contrasted with the current situation, in which the cot-caught merger has progressed to a state of completion in perception and very small differences in production, the cord-card merger is being abandoned, and /ai/-monophthongization exists only at a very low level. Possible reasons for this include a movement toward regional rather than local norms resulting from greater contact between varieties in the Intermountain West during the twentieth century

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.