Arab American Youth and Sound Change in Southeastern Michigan.

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the spread of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) sound change among Arab American high school students in Dearborn, Michigan. The NCS is a set of vowel changes found in speakers from Chicago, IL, to Buffalo, NY. Using data collected during ethnographically-oriented fieldwork at a high school in Dearborn, this study uses acoustic and statistical analysis to model the sociolinguistic variation of four NCS vowels in seventeen speakers.

This dissertation tests the effectiveness of Eckert’s (2000) sociolinguistic sound change model in explaining the sociolinguistic variation found in the data in this study. In Eckert’s proposed model, there is a relationship between how long a vocalic variable has been in use and how it spreads. In her findings, a group of students oriented towards a local, working-class lifestyle and culture pick up newer “urban” NCS variables through their network ties to Detroit, which are then used to construct a local social contrast within the high school that is based largely on social class. Older NCS vocalic variables, on the other hand, have lost their urban affiliation and now carry broader regional associations.

The results demonstrate that Arab American speakers use the NCS vowels as a local sociolinguistic resource, suggesting that the spread of regional sound changes is not limited by speakers’ ethnic identities. Further, while two of the vowels appear to be affiliated with mainstream social identities, use of a third vowel seems to be linked to precisely the opposite: non-mainstream, or marginalized, social identities. Thus, the social meaning of the shift is not identical for each individual vowel: different vowels in the shift can serve as different kinds of sociolinguistic resources.

The findings here suggest Eckert’s model is too specific to the sociolinguistic and geographic contexts of her study. I suggest broadening the model to (1) rely on social categories based on a local mainstream/marginalized distinction that is broader than (but could still encompass) a social class distinction alone, and (2) look for differences in the social meaning of individual vowels that are not linked to how long a vowel has been part of the shift.