Where education and salience meet, local dialects retreat

1. Where education and salience meet, local dialects retreat Hilary Prichard Robin Dodsworth University of Pennsylvania North Carolina State University NWAV 42 - October 2013

2. Prichard & Dodsworth Interaction of education & salience • Prichard and Tamminga (2012) introduced a novel 4-level education index • No higher education (high school or less) • Local, community college, often 2-year degree • Regional, 4-year college, draws students from across region • National, prestigious, geographically diverse student body • Hypothesized that education interacts with social salience in a gradient fashion • National university educated speakers lead retreat from salient local features

3. Prichard & Dodsworth Testing the interaction • We test this hypothesis in two locations: • Philadelphia, PA • reversal of socially-salient dialect features • no evidence of influence of large-scale dialect contact • Raleigh, NC • leveling of SVS features following dialect contact • large-scale migration of Northerners begins in 1960s

4. Prichard & Dodsworth Philadelphia, PA • Reversal of: • /æh/ BAD • /oh/ THOUGHT • /aw/ MOUTH • Ongoing change in: • /eyC/ FACE • /ay0/ PRICE Labov et al. 2013 document: BAD represents tense class of Philadelphia split short-a system THOUGHT is especially tense and raised in Philadelphia MOUTH is raised and fronted FACE is raised and fronted in checked position PRICE is raised before voiceless consonants

5. Prichard & Dodsworth Philadelphia vowel salience • Three vowels undergoing reversal are also salient • 1970s LCV studies showed “moderate degree of awareness” for raised MOUTH but not PRICE • Labov et al. 2013 identify tense BAD and THOUGHT as local stereotypes • As of yet no evidence of social awareness of FACE raising

6. Prichard & Dodsworth Philadelphia sound changes Ed D., male born 1889, high school education Spaz A., male born 1992, high school education

7. Prichard & Dodsworth Philadelphia Data • Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (Labov et al. 2013) • 201 speakers born between 1889 and 1994 • 134: No higher education • 23: Local college (e.g., Phila. Community College) • 27: Regional college (e.g., Drexel University) • 17: National college (e.g., University of Pennsylvania)

8. Prichard & Dodsworth

9. Prichard & Dodsworth Changes in progress

10. Prichard & Dodsworth Reversal of change

11. Prichard & Dodsworth Reversal of change

12. Prichard & Dodsworth

13. Prichard & Dodsworth Philadelphia Statistics • Fit a mixed effects model for each vowel variable • Fixed effects of DOB, Education, Sex • By-speaker and by-word random intercepts • Education is significant main effect for: • BAD all comparisons sig. except local vs. high school • THOUGHT all comparisons sig. except local vs. high school • MOUTH national vs. regional *, local ***, high school *** • vs. • FACE no significant differences • PRICEnational vs. local *, high school **

14. Prichard & Dodsworth Philadelphia • Education groups are well-differentiated for the three salient vowels, BAD, MOUTH, and THOUGHT • Modeling shows that local, regional, and national groups are statistically different • but HS and local are not

15. Prichard & Dodsworth Raleigh, NC: Southern Vowel Shift FLEECE KIT FACE DRESS TRAP

16. Prichard & Dodsworth Raleigh, NC • Dodsworth & Kohn (2012) find reversal of the SVS • Second stage of SVS demonstrated to be salient & negatively-stereotyped in Memphis (Fridland et al. 2004)

17. Prichard & Dodsworth Raleigh Data • Raleigh Corpus (Dodsworth & Kohn 2012) • 122 speakers born between 1923 and 1989 • 20: No higher education • 13: Local college (e.g., Wake Tech) • 60: Regional college (e.g., NC State, UNC-Greensboro) • 29: National college (e.g., Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill)

18. Prichard & Dodsworth Change over time in the Raleigh front vowel system

19. Prichard & Dodsworth Raleigh: FLEECE & KIT reversal

20. Prichard & Dodsworth Raleigh: FACE & DRESS reversal

21. Prichard & Dodsworth Raleigh: TRAP retraction

22. Prichard & Dodsworth Raleigh changes by education group

23. Prichard & Dodsworth Raleigh Statistics • Fixed effects of preceding & following place, DOB, education, duration • By-speaker random intercepts, by-duration random slopes • Education is significant only in the model for FACE • national vs. local ** • regional vs. local marginal (p=.06)

24. Prichard & Dodsworth Discussion • In Philadelphia we saw: • Strong reversal of BAD, THOUGHT, MOUTH • led by national group • Continuing change in FACE, PRICE • Whereas in Raleigh: • All features have some degree of salience • Education groups are not well differentiated • But lack the clear lock-step pattern seen in Philadelphia changes from below

25. Prichard & Dodsworth Conclusions • Initial hypothesis is borne out: • The effect of college education is not uniform • National university speakers show greatest retreat from salient local features

26. Prichard & Dodsworth Thank You!References • Dodsworth, Robin, and Mary Kohn. 2012. Urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone. Language Variation and Change 24:221–245. • Fridland, Valerie, Kathryn Bartlett, and Roger Kreuz. 2004. Do you hear what I hear? Experimental measurement of the perceptual salience of acoustically manipulated vowel variants by Southern speakers in Memphis, TN. Language Variation and Change 16:1–16. • Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell. • Labov, William, Ingrid Rosenfelder, and Josef Fruehwald. 2013. One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: linear incrementation, reversal and re-analysis. Language 89:30–65. • Prichard, Hilary, and Meredith Tamminga. 2012. The impact of higher education on Philadelphia vowels. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 18.2:87–95.