Stanford University

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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