An acoustic study of Southeastern Michigan Appalachian and African -American Southern migrant vowel systems.

Abstract

This dissertation quantifies fronting of the high and lower-high back vowels and glide-weakening of /ai/ for 6 African American and 6 Appalachian White Detroit females. One of the most significant empirical findings is that the African American speakers show consistent fronting of the high and lower-high back vowels and glide-weakening of/ai/in the pre-voiceless context, patterns which according to all but the most recent reports are characteristic only of White speakers. In contrast to Labovian treatment of vowel rotations in American English as largely structural and mechanical, with social factors having little influence on them, the proposed approach treats shifting vowel patterns as socially mediated and infused with local language ideologies. I argue that the Southern variant of /ai/ provides a crucial site for indexing ethnic and regional identity among participants while fronting of the high and lower-high back vowels does not; fronting of these vowels is apparently a global change, reported for varieties of English around the world. Another important difference between glide-weakened /ai/ and fronted back vowels is that the former does not show the lawful contextual conditioning of the latter. In other words, fronting is constrained by universal phonetic (i.e. internal) factors, but /ai/ glide-weakening is not. The Detroit African American speakers in this study have undergone a process of allophonic leveling that, while bringing their patterns into alignment with the Appalachian White speakers, indexes a strong contrast with the Midwestern Whites. External, rather than internal, factors conditioned this change. The migration of African Americans from the South to Detroit resulted in a massive upheaval and subsequent restructuring of their social and linguistic realities which resulted in the pre-voiceless diphthongal allophone of /ai/ becoming socially redundant. In the South, AAE pre-voiceless diphthongal /ai/ indexes an opposition with Southern White groups that use the variant, but it is no longer necessary for the Detroit AAE speakers to index this social opposition. Differentiation among different social and linguistic groups became salient following migration from the rural South to the urban Midwest, and these changes in social differentiation precipitated changes in language ideologies, language attitudes, patterns of use, and social indexing among speaker groups.