Graduate Students
Linguistics
Department
Stanford
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Stanford Linguistics Department
FIRST ANNUAL QP FEST
Friday, May 28, 2004 Cordura 100, CSLI
Lauren Hall-Lew
The Western Vowel Shift in Northern Arizona
Abstract
Dialect geographies have had little to say about the
English in Arizona because of its relatively recent settlement history.
Only in the late 20th century could a sizeable population of European
Americans claim multigenerational affiliation to the Western US, creating
necessary and fertile ground for a study of emerging speech patterns.
This paper will demonstrate Arizona's developing linguistic alignment with
Oregon, Utah, and California English, and to introduce some crucial data
on some of the variation among different Arizona English varieties. This
is the first analysis of English in Arizona, drawn from interview data
with residents of Flagstaff, a city in Northern Arizona.
Productions of fronted back vowels /uw/ (as in too, dude,
and shoe) and /ow/ (as in go, boat, and so) as well as the raised low
vowel /Q/ before nasals (as in ran, Sam, and band) are taken as evidence
for Arizona's dialectological unification with the other Western states.
The analysis of these variables suggests that vowel shift patterns are
spreading eastwards from the Pacific Coast and into the Southwest. I also
consider additional evidence for the backing of /Q/ before obstruents and
a monophthongized variant of /ow/. Internal constraints for each vowel
support the existing research on vowel movement, and the data show that
younger speakers produce the shifted variants more than older speakers.
This synchronic analysis will address Labovian claims of
change-in-progress versus static age gradation, given that neither sex class
nor socioeconomic class correlates with the variables, contrary to comparable
community variation studies in the Labovian tradition (e.g., Labov, 1996 &
1982; Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972). This raises the question of defining
community-appropriate sociolinguistic categories for Arizona and the general
Southwestern US.
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