In Raleigh, North Carolina, a Southern U.S. city, five decades of in-migration of technology-sector workers from outside the South has resulted in large-scale contact between the local Southern dialect and non-Southern dialects. This paper investigates the speed and magnitude of the reversal of the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) with respect to the five front vowels, using Trudgill's (1998) model of dialect contact as a framework. The data consist of conversational interviews with 59 white-collar Raleigh natives representing three generations, the first generation having reached adulthood before large-scale contact. Acoustic analysis shows that all vowels shift away from their Southern variants across apparent time. The leveling of SVS variants begins within the first generation to grow up after large-scale contact began, and contrary to predictions, this generation does not show wide inter- or intraspeaker variability. Previous studies of dialect contact and new dialect formation suggest that leveling of regional dialect features and the establishment of stable linguistic norms occurs more quickly when children have regular contact with one another. Dialect contact in Raleigh has occurred primarily within the middle and upper classes, the members of which are densely connected by virtue of schools and heavy economic segregation in neighborhood residence.

Speaker vowel formant normalization, a technique that controls for variation introduced by physical differences between speakers, is necessary in variationist studies to compare speakers of different ages, genders, and physiological makeup in order to understand non-physiological variation patterns within populations. Many algorithms have been established to reduce variation introduced into vocalic data from physiological sources. The lack of real-time studies tracking the effectiveness of these normalization algorithms from childhood through adolescence inhibits exploration of child participation in vowel shifts. This analysis compares normalization techniques applied to data collected from ten African American children across five time points. Linear regressions compare the reduction in variation attributable to age and gender for each speaker for the vowels BEET, BAT, BOT, BUT, and BOAR. A normalization technique is successful if it maintains variation attributable to a reference sociolinguistic variable, while reducing variation attributable to age. Results indicate that normalization techniques which rely on both a measure of central tendency and range of the vowel space perform best at reducing variation attributable to age, although some variation attributable to age persists after normalization for some sections of the vowel space.

This study explores quotative system norms within Latino communities and African American communities in two cities in North Carolina, Durham and Hickory, to identify how social and ethnic distribution intersects with regional distribution in such systems. Quotative frames were transcribed from sociolinguistic interviews conducted with 35 Latino and 27 African American participants between the ages of 9 and 21. The quotative verb form and the tense, person, and content of the quotation were analyzed as a basis for examining its distribution. Correlating Latino participants' length of residency in the United States to quotative usage provided insight into the possible effect of second-language acquisition on quotative systems. Quotative be like was found to be grammaticalized as a reporter of direct speech and thought in all communities and was favored in the first person for the Latino speech communities, mirroring prior studies of Anglo communities. Results indicate that Latino and African American quotative systems are aligning with other systems identified in the United States with respect to the types of verbal quotatives used and content constraints, though each group and region varies in the application of previously observed constraints. Quotative frames consist of the syntactic bracketing of directly reported speech or inner dialogue, as in My brother say, "You so scaredy-cat, you should get out" and I was like, "No, no, no, no!" An important part of narrative, quotative markers such as say and be like, in combination with directly reported speech, allow speakers to forefront dialogue by avoiding the syntactic complexity of subordination that occurs with indirect speech (Romaine and Lange 1991; Yule and Mathis 1992). 1 This increases narrative involvement as well as provides narrative-internal evaluation (Tannen 1989). Although this form of relating dialogue is among the oldest morphosyntactic narrative devices recorded for the English language (Visser 1966), the verbs used to frame

Since Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt ones; on the other, subject-verb (SV) is opposed to verb-subject (VS). Although null subjects strongly correlate with coreferentiality with the subject of the previous clause, they can also index more distant referents within a single episode. With respect to SV vs. VS, morpholexical classes are found to be biased toward one or the other: nouns are typically VS, pronouns SV. We conclude that the null subject variant is the norm in Emirati Arabic, and when an overt subject is appropriate, lexical identity biases the subject into SV or VS order, generating word order as a discourse-relevant parameter. Overall, our approach attempts to understand Arabic discourse from a microlevel perspective.

African American Language (AAL) is one of the most researched varieties of American English, yet key aspects of its development and spread remain under‐theorized. For example, regional and social variation in the speech of African Americans was initially understudied in AAL as scholars sought to demonstrate the overall systematicity of the variety, often at the expense of examining variation across and within communities. More recently, scholars have begun to address this gap by examining different sources of variation in AAL phonology. For instance, the African American Vowel System (AAVS), also called the African American Vowel Shift, describes a pattern identified within AAL, including the raising of the front lax vowels and the nonfronting of the high‐ and mid‐back vowels. Aspects of the AAVS have been found in geographically widespread varieties of AAL, suggesting that shared patterns of population movement resulting from the Great Migration and subsequent social experiences may have led to the development of this system. Other more regionally limited sound patterns suggest the role of more localized processes of variation and change. We focus on three sources of variation that have contributed to the spread and realizations of the sound system in modern AAL: migration, segregation, and place and identity. Evidence from sociophonetic analyses across these three factors provides a foundation to more thoroughly document the ways in which AAL varieties developed, spread, and vary, while allowing for a more nuanced assessment of racialization and its implications for individual differences. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Psychology > Language