Where education and salience meet, local dialects retreat Hilary Prichard Robin Dodsworth University...

Where education and salience meet, local dialects retreat

Hilary Prichard Robin DodsworthUniversity of Pennsylvania North Carolina State University

NWAV 42 - October 2013

Prichard & Dodsworth

Interaction of education & salience• Prichard and Tamminga (2012) introduced a novel 4-level education index

• No higher education (high school or less)• Local, community college, often 2-year degree• Regional, 4-year college, draws students from across region• National, prestigious, geographically diverse student body

• Hypothesized that education interacts with social salience in a gradient fashion

• National university educated speakers lead retreat from salient local features

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Testing the interaction• We test this hypothesis in two locations:

• Philadelphia, PA• reversal of socially-salient dialect features• no evidence of influence of large-scale dialect

contact

• Raleigh, NC• leveling of SVS features following dialect contact• large-scale migration of Northerners begins in

1960s

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Philadelphia, PA

• Reversal of:• /æh/ BAD

• /oh/ THOUGHT • /aw/ MOUTH

• Ongoing change in:

• /eyC/ FACE• /ay0/ PRICE

BAD represents tense class of Philadelphia split short-a systemTHOUGHT is especially tense and raised in PhiladelphiaMOUTH is raised and frontedFACE is raised and fronted in checked positionPRICE is raised before voiceless consonants

Labov et al. 2013 document:

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Philadelphia vowel salience• Three vowels undergoing reversal are also salient

• 1970s LCV studies showed “moderate degree of awareness” for raised MOUTH but not PRICE

• Labov et al. 2013 identify tense BAD and THOUGHT as local stereotypes

• As of yet no evidence of social awareness of FACE raising

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Philadelphia sound changes

Ed D., male born 1889, high school educationSpaz A., male born 1992, high school education

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Philadelphia Data• Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (Labov et al. 2013)

• 201 speakers born between 1889 and 1994

• 134: No higher education• 23: Local college (e.g., Phila. Community College)• 27: Regional college (e.g., Drexel University)• 17: National college (e.g., University of Pennsylvania)

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Changes in progress

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Reversal of change

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Reversal of change

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Philadelphia Statistics• Fit a mixed effects model for each vowel variable• Fixed effects of DOB, Education, Sex• By-speaker and by-word random intercepts

• Education is significant main effect for:• BAD all comparisons sig. except local vs. high

school• THOUGHT all comparisons sig. except local vs. high

school• MOUTH national vs. regional *, local ***, high school

***

• vs.• FACE no significant differences• PRICE national vs. local *, high school **

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Philadelphia• Education groups are well-differentiated for the three salient vowels, BAD, MOUTH, and THOUGHT

• Modeling shows that local, regional, and national groups are statistically different • but HS and local are not

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Raleigh, NC: Southern Vowel Shift

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FLEECE

KIT

FACE

DRESS

TRAP

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Raleigh, NC• Dodsworth & Kohn (2012) find reversal of the SVS

• Second stage of SVS demonstrated to be salient & negatively-stereotyped in Memphis (Fridland et al. 2004)

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Raleigh Data• Raleigh Corpus (Dodsworth & Kohn 2012)

• 122 speakers born between 1923 and 1989

• 20: No higher education• 13: Local college (e.g., Wake Tech)• 60: Regional college (e.g., NC State, UNC-Greensboro)• 29: National college (e.g., Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill)

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Change over time in the Raleigh front vowel system

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Raleigh: FLEECE & KIT reversal

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Raleigh: FACE & DRESS reversal

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Raleigh: TRAP retraction

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Raleigh changes by education group

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Raleigh Statistics• Fixed effects of preceding & following place, DOB, education, duration• By-speaker random intercepts, by-duration random slopes

• Education is significant only in the model for FACE• national vs. local ** • regional vs. local marginal (p=.06)

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Discussion• In Philadelphia we saw:• Strong reversal of BAD, THOUGHT, MOUTH • led by national group• Continuing change in FACE, PRICE

• Whereas in Raleigh:• All features have some degree of salience• Education groups are not well differentiated• But lack the clear lock-step pattern seen in Philadelphia

changes from below

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Conclusions• Initial hypothesis is borne out:

• The effect of college education is not uniform

• National university speakers show greatest retreat from salient local features

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Thank You!References

• Dodsworth, Robin, and Mary Kohn. 2012. Urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone. Language Variation and Change 24:221–245.

• Fridland, Valerie, Kathryn Bartlett, and Roger Kreuz. 2004. Do you hear what I hear? Experimental measurement of the perceptual salience of acoustically manipulated vowel variants by Southern speakers in Memphis, TN. Language Variation and Change 16:1–16.

• Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.

• Labov, William, Ingrid Rosenfelder, and Josef Fruehwald. 2013. One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: linear incrementation, reversal and re-analysis. Language 89:30–65.

• Prichard, Hilary, and Meredith Tamminga. 2012. The impact of higher education on Philadelphia vowels. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18.2:87–95.

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Where education and salience meet, local dialects retreat Hilary Prichard Robin Dodsworth University...

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