This paper provides a sociolinguistic analysis of variation in the English definite article, a.k.a. definite article reduction (DAR), in the city of York, northeast Yorkshire, England. Embedding the analysis in historical, dialectological and contemporary studies of this phenomenon, the findings uncover a rich system of variability between the standard forms as well as reduced and zero variants. These are involved in a system of multicausal constraints, phonological, grammatical, and discourse-pragmatic that are consistent across the speech community. However, the reduced variants are not derivative of each other, but reflect contrasting functions in the system. Interestingly, the reduced variants are accelerating in use among the young men, suggesting that DAR is being recycled as an identity marker of the local vernacular. This change is put in sociohistorical context by an appeal to the recently developing interest and evolving prestige of Northern Englishes more generally.
The literature on Canadian English provides evidence of distinct dialect regions. Within this landscape, the province of British Columbia is set apart as a sub-region in the west, yet information concerning “local” English is notably skewed toward a single urban setting, Vancouver. To assess and extend the generalizability of prior observations, this paper targets the city of Victoria and situates the results from a large-scale sociolinguistic investigation within the model of the typical (western) Canadian city presented in Boberg (2008, 2010). We consider vocalic features characterized as either General Canadian or distinctively Western Canadian. We also consider “yod” (i.e., the presence of an onglide in student, tune, and the like), a conservative feature that is obsolescing across the nation. Our results support Boberg’s (2008, 2010) observations while positioning Victoria as both innovative—participating in national changes—and conservative—joining certain changes relatively recently and retaining older dialect features. Such results enable us to trace leveling to national and more local dialect patterns, while also reminding us of sociohistorical forces in the formation of dialects.
The Canadian Shift, a change-in-progress that is affecting the lax vowel subsystem of Canadian English, has been found to be active in a number of cities across Canada. Very little is known about the geolinguistic history and spread of the shift, however. Combining apparent time data from Thunder Bay, Ontario, with a comparison of lax vowel pronunciation in the speech of young people from both Thunder Bay and Toronto, the current study presents evidence against the hypothesis that the Canadian Shift has spread to Thunder Bay by way of a gravity model of diffusion. Although not identical, the vowel configurations are quite similar in the speech of young people from the two cities, and the apparent time findings suggest that the shift in Thunder Bay has not lagged behind the shift in Toronto. Results support the proposal that the English of Thunder Bay and Toronto share a common source and that the low back vowel merger, the pre-cursor for the shift, was brought westward with the settlers to Thunder Bay in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Subsequently, the Canadian Shift occurred simultaneously in both areas. Evidence of more urban features in the pronunciation of several Thunder Bay teenagers also raises questions about the future impact of mobility on the local dialect.
This article investigates the influence of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) on the production and perception of English vowels by Mexican Americans in Lansing, Michigan. Findings indicate full accommodation to local mainstream norms with respect to all NCS vowels except /æ/, which displays unique patterning both prenasally and in other environments. The evidence also reveals that young women in Lansing, both Anglo and Mexican American, have adopted more advanced stages of the NCS than men in their pronunciations of the vowels /I/, /ϵ/, and prenasal /æ/. Perception results match production results such that, among the six vowels examined, only /æ/ differs significantly between groups. These findings suggest that, although constant exposure to and interaction with the local matrix group appear to have led to nearly total accommodation to local NCS features in the English of Mexican Americans in Lansing, pronunciation of the vowel /æ/, in particular, reflects unique patterns of history and identity.
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