COMPARING PHONETIC CHARACTERISTICS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN AMERICAN SPEECH

Abstract

African American English (AAE) has been studied more heavily, by far, than any other forms of American English. Nevertheless, much of the emphasis has been placed on morphosyntactic variants and its phonetic characteristics are poorly known. We examined several variables to see how AAE differs phonetically from European American English (EAE) varieties in North Carolina. Forty interviews were drawn from the North Carolina Language and Life Pro-ject corpus at North Carolina State University from three North Carolina counties: Hyde, Robeson, and Warren. Speakers included ten older and ten younger African Americans and ten older and ten younger European Americans, balanced among the three counties and by sex. The interviews were all conversational. Tokens were measured with the Praat software using methods appropriate to the particular vari-able. AAE is known to differ from EAE for several vowel quality variables (Thomas 2001). We examined one front vowel, /re/, and one back vowel, /0/. Results are shown in Figure 1. Each symbol represents the mean value of tokens measured for

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