1 / 13

Today: Accents and Dialects of US English

Today: Accents and Dialects of US English. This hour: What is a dialect? An accent? What contributes to a listener's perception of accented speech? From lexical to phonological atlases: American dialectology What phonological differences may be observed between dialects of US English?.

arleen
Download Presentation

Today: Accents and Dialects of US English

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Today: Accents and Dialects of US English This hour: • What is a dialect? An accent? • What contributes to a listener's perception of accented speech? • From lexical to phonological atlases: American dialectology • What phonological differences may be observed between dialects of US English? Key term: Isogloss: a graphical representation marking the distributional limits of lexical items or linguistic forms (sometimes the area associated with a linguistic form)

  2. What is a dialect?…an accent? Dialect--a local form of "a language”; often associated with a particular region (regional dialect) or subsection of a larger language community (sociolect). --regionally or socially distinctive--vary in relatively minor aspects of their pronunciation (“accent”), vocabulary and grammar (how words are combined into sentences) … Similar techniques for diagnosing dialects may be used for all languages

  3. Traditional Dialectology Aims: Provide ahistoricalrecord of the language Show areal distribution of unique linguistic features Not concerned with representing the speech of the community

  4. Traditional Dialectology Method: Administer a dialect survey targeting specific lexical items, pronunciations (diagnostic forms) Collect data from representative community members, called NORMs Typically, sampling was done by relying on population density Lines indicating the distributional limits of lexical items or linguistic forms are called isoglosses. Focus: Lexical Grammatical Phonological Two recent subfields of sociolinguistics in which dialect descriptions are now accomplished: Sociophonetics -- Instrumental phonetics supplements auditory phonetic and phonological analysis Urban Dialectology -- Utilizes updated lexical-cartographic methods (TELSUR)

  5. Where are they from? U I o u ´ A i

  6. Map of US Dialects Karen Susie Margaret Michele Lisa Nancy Peggy

  7. Diagnosing Dialect Differences • Phonological differences. For the most part, the features that distinguish us from people in other parts of the country are our vowels! • -- Vowels (a, e, i, o, u, ai, oi, ei, au) • -- Consonants (r,t, d, th)

  8. Diagnosing Dialect Differences

  9. Northern Cities and Southern Cities Vowel Shifts (Labov, 1991) u˘ i˘ (uw) boot (iy) beat I (i) bit U (u) book o˘ (ow) boat e˘ US NORTH (ey) beat √ (uh) but E (e) bet ç (oh) ball, caught Q (ae) bat a (o) bottle, father • key characteristics: fronting of (a), tensing and raising of (ae), backing of short (e,i), lowering of (oh) in W New England, N PA, N OH, IN, IL, MI, WI (Buffalo, Chicago) • traditionally tense (long) vowels and /U/ are unaffected • lax subsystem is moving • ordering of elements via “push” and “drag” chains somewhat controversial

  10. Northern Cities and Southern Cities Vowel Shifts (Labov, 1991) u˘ i˘ (uw) boot (iy) beat I (i) bit U (u) book o˘ (ow) boat e˘ US SOUTH (ey) beat √ (uh) but E (e) bet ç (oh) ball, caught Q (ae) bat a (o) bottle, father • key characteristics: fronting of long back vowels (uw), (ow), upward rotation and development of inglides in short (e,i) while long (ey,iy) rotate back and downward in all of the US South • both shifts are viewed as related (and separate from a third pattern, associated with the merger of (oh-a) ).

  11. In the recent news... Detroit vowels: http://www.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels.html Buffalo (Donald Herbert story): http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5227036&ft=1&f=1001 “Don” (a)-fronting “father”(a)-fronting New Orleans: Dislocated family resettling in Seattle: http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kplu/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=881425 “other” (th)-stopping “crying” (ay) “chicken,” “fish” short-(i)

  12. The new attention to phonology:Representing Dialect Speech Method: 1. International phonetic alphabet (IPA): Traditional dialectology 2. Auditory analysis: Traditional dialectology and Sociolinguistics 3. Instrumental analysis: Sociophonetics

  13. Representing Dialect Speech • Method: • International Phonetic Alphabet • 1. Low-central /a/ (non-centralized) 4. /å/ • 2. Raised /a/: /a£/ 5. Raised /å/: /å¢/ • 3. Lowered /å/ : /å¢/ 6. and finally, schwa: /´/ • R-colored vowels • “purr” /p‘/ “heard” /h‘d/ “sir” /s‘/

More Related