One Hundred Years of Sound Change in Philadelphia: Linear Incrementation, Reversal, and Reanalysis

Abstract

The study of sound change in progress in Philadelphia has been facilitated by the application of forced alignment and automatic vowel measurement to a large corpus of neighborhood studies, including 379 speakers with dates of birth from 1888 to 1991. Two of the sound changes active in the 1970s show a linear pattern of incrementation in succeeding decades. The fronting of back upgliding vowels /aw/ and /ow/ shows a reversal in the direction of change, beginning with those born after 1940. The study also finds a general withdrawal from two salient features of local phonology, tense /æh/ and /oh/, led by those with higher education. Younger speakers with higher education have also reorganized the traditional Philadelphia tense/lax split of short- a to form a nasal system with tensing before all and only nasal consonants. The development of the Philadelphia vowel system can be understood in the geographic context of neighboring dialects. Features in common with North and North Midland dialects have accelerated in use while features in common with South Midland and Southern dialects have been reversed in favor of Northern patterns. The microevolution of a linguistic system can be seen here as subject to phonological generalizations but driven by social evaluation as features rise in level of salience for members of the speech community.

North American /l/ both darkens and lightens depending on morphological constituency and segmental context

“…While a growing body of research uses forced-alignment as the first step in acoustic analysis (e.g., Clayards & Doty, 2011;DiCanio, Nam, Amith, García, & Whalen, 2015;Labov, Rosenfelder, and Fruehwald, 2013;Renwick, Baghai-Ravary, Temple, & Coleman, 2013;Yuan & Liberman, 2011b), we also compared the results of the automatic alignment with results from a subset of data in which the /l/ boundaries were hand-adjusted. The subset of data consisted of 276 tokens (approximately 50%) selected randomly from Experiment 2 (e.g., freely, Healy, mealy and velum, realest, kneeless).…”

Variation and Change in the Use of Hesitation Markers in Germanic Languages

“…Third, we analyzed the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (PNC; Labov et al, 2013), which contains transcripts of interviews with speakers from the Philadelphia area conducted from 1973 to 2013. We extracted all 25,514 tokens of UM (i.e.…”

Generations, lifespans, and the zeitgeist

“…In Labov, Rosenfelder, and Fruehwald (2013), speakers' date of birth was used as the primary temporal measure of language change. To justify this approach, they examined the Generations, Lifespans and the Zeitgeist 9 goodness of fit for models using year of interview, speakers' age, and speakers' date of birth to predict the outcome of two different changes.…”

“…Speakers in the corpus are largely working class, but a consistent classification is not available for all speakers. Labov, Rosenfelder, and Fruehwald (2013). 1880-1899 1900-1919 1920-1939 1940-1959 1960-1978 1980-1999 female no 1 26 33 40 29 5 female yes -2 9 12 8 5 female unknown -3 3 3 1 1 male no 1 12 29 24 23 6 male yes --8 14 13 4 male unknown -5 2 2 1 - All vowel formant data was automatically extracted using the FAVE-suite (Rosenfelder et al 2015).…”

“…1880-1899 1900-1919 1920-1939 1940-1959 1960-1978 1980-1999 female no 1 26 33 40 29 5 female yes -2 9 12 8 5 female unknown -3 3 3 1 1 male no 1 12 29 24 23 6 male yes --8 14 13 4 male unknown -5 2 2 1 - All vowel formant data was automatically extracted using the FAVE-suite (Rosenfelder et al 2015). A more complete explanation of the FAVE procedures is given in Labov, Rosenfelder, and Fruehwald (2013). After force aligning a manual transcription to the audio, vowel formants are estimated using Bayesian formant tracking, excluding any tokens which have Generations, Lifespans and the Zeitgeist 12 overlapping noise or speech, as well as any vowels shorter than 50ms.…”