Voices of coastal Georgia

Abstract

The Southern dialect of American English has been characterized with a number of distinctive vowel features. These include what is known as the Southern Shift, in which /aɪ/ monophthongizes to /a:/; /æ, ɛ, ɪ/ are raised and fronted, while /i/ and /e/ are lowered and backed, and [oʊ, u] are fronted (Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006; Thomas 2001). Although these productions are widely accepted as representative features of Southern speech, the assertions that they are pervasive are actually based on a limited amount of mostly impressionistic data. The current study utilizes the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS), an extensive historical audio sociolinguistic corpus of interviews with 914 speakers collected from 1968-1983, to acoustically analyze the speech of ten speakers in the U.S. South (5M, 5F; mean age 63.7) to compare the predictions of the aforementioned shifts to the linguistic reality of speech production. Unlike previous studies of LAGS, which have largely relied on impressionistic transcriptions of target lexical items, this study relies on full interviews (mean length 3.5 hours). Results reveal wide individual variation in the adoption of specific Southern features, and overall a more complex picture of vowel production than traditional notions of Southern dialects suggest.

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