Abstract
AbstractA number of studies of African American communities show a tendency to approximate the phonological patterns of the surrounding mainstream white community. An analysis of the vowel systems of 36 African American speakers in the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus compares their development over the 20th century with that of the mainstream community. For vowels involved in change in the white community, African Americans show very different patterns, often moving in opposite directions. The traditional split of short-a words into tense and lax categories is a more fine-grained measure of dialect relations. The degree of participation by African Americans is described by measures of bimodality, which are applied as well to the innovative nasal short-a system. The prototypical African American speakers show no bimodality in either measure, recombining the traditional tense and lax categories into a single short-a in lower mid, nonperipheral position. The lack of relation between the two short-a systems is related to the high degree of residential segregation, in that linguistic contact is largely diffusion among adults rather than the faithful transmission found among children.
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Education,Language and Linguistics
Reference35 articles.
1. Local identity and ethnicity in Pittsburgh AA;Gooden;University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics,2007
2. 10. How to get to be one kind of Midwesterner
3. Cofer Thomas . (1972). Linguistic variability in a Philadelphia speech community. Phd dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Cited by
17 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Multidimensional Identity as Bricolage: Indexing Race and Place in Bakersfield, California;American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistic Usage;2024-07-10
2. Assessing contact-induced change in Palestinian Arabic: Evidence from Beirut;Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique;2024-05-30
3. TH-stopping in Philadelphia Puerto Rican English;Language Variation and Change;2024-02-23
4. References;Sounds of English Worldwide;2023-03-21
5. Dialect Death: Gascon and Occitan;Language and Dialect Death;2023