Migration, accommodation and language change : language at the intersection of regional and ethnic identity / Bridget L. Anderson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Anderson, Bridget L., 1972-

Series:

Palgrave studies in language variation

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English language--Variation--United States.

English language.

English language--Variation.

United States.

English language--Dialects--United States.

English language--Dialects.

English language--Social aspects--United States.

English language--Social aspects.

Physical Description:

xviii, 196 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Houndmills [England] ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Summary:

In the early decades of the twentieth century, large numbers of African American and White Southerners migrated from the rural South to the urban Midwest as part of the most significant internal migration in US history. This is a linguistic study of the Southern migrant experience in Detroit, a city with a reputation of being the most racially polarized and residentially segregated urban area in America. Although African American and Appalachian White Southern migrants and their descendants are two groups that are separated by ethnicity, they share a regional affiliation with the South as well as Southern cultural characteristics. This situation provides a unique opportunity to examine ways in which the interaction of ethnicity and regional affiliation gives rise to systematic patterns of language variation and change and phonetic restructuring as a result of language contact. Linguistic effects of large-scale migration for these two Southern groups across three generations of speakers are described and compared to the surrounding dialect norms of Midwestern Whites through acoustic analysis of portions of the vowel systems. The quantitative acoustic analysis is interpreted with reference to rich qualitative data obtained through the author's four years of ethnographic fieldwork.

Contents:

2 Empirical and Theoretical Background 4

2.1 American English vowel shifts in progress 5

2.1.1 The Northern Cities Chain Shift 5

2.1.2 The Southern Shift 6

2.1.3 African American vowel systems 7

2.1.4 /ai/ 9

2.1.5 The high and lower-high back vowels /u/ and /[characters not reproducible]/ 11

2.2 Models of change 13

2.2.1 Internal and external factors in language change 13

2.2.2 Language ideology: An overview 14

2.2.3 Dialect contact 16

3 The Sociolinguistic and Demographic Context for the Study 18

3.1 Research site and demography of the area 18

3.2 History of migration to southeastern Michigan 21

3.2.1 Appalachian White migration to Detroit 21

3.2.2 African American migration to Detroit 24

3.3 Appalachian Whites and African American Southern migrants in the Detroit area 26

3.4 Appalachian English 28

3.4.1 In the Southern Highlands 28

3.4.2 In Southeastern Michigan 31

3.5 African American English 31

3.5.1 In the South 31

3.5.2 In Southeastern Michigan 32

3.6 Midwestern urban Whites 33

4 The Pilot Study 35

4.1 /ai/ 35

4.1.1 Participants and methods of analysis for the pilot study 35

4.1.2 The patterning of /ai/ 36

4.2 Acoustic analysis of /[epsilon]/ and /ae/ for five Appalachian White women, five African American women, and five Northern White women 39

5 Field Techniques and Acoustic Methods 47

5.1 Study design 47

5.1.1 Speaker selection 47

5.1.2 Participant observation and ethnography 49

5.1.3 Data analysis 50

5.1.4 Individual first versus community first 51

5.2 Field methodology 53

5.2.2 Fieldwork and data collection 55

5.2.3 Recording procedures 57

5.3 Acoustic analysis 57

5.3.1 Temporal locations and measures 58

5.3.2 Spectral measures 58

5.4 Spectral comparisons 59

6 The High and Lower-High Back Vowels 65

6.1 Analysis of /u/[tilde]/i/ and /[characters not reproducible]/[tilde]/I/ distances at midpoint and offset 66

6.1.1 Methods for the statistical analysis 66

6.1.2 Descriptive overview of fronting patterns 67

6.1.2.1 African American, Appalachian, and Midwestern White groups 68

6.1.2.2 African American and Appalachian speakers 69

6.1.3 Statistical analysis of F[subscript 2] distances 75

6.1.4 Summary and significance of the F[subscript 2] distance results 79

6.2 Context effects of consonants on preceding vowels 80

6.2.1 Effects of following alveolar consonantal context on vowel spectra 81

6.2.2 Effects of following labial consonantal context on vowel spectra 83

6.2.3 Word-final context 84

6.2.4 Effects of following velar consonantal context on vowel spectra 84

6.3 Rounding and backing 86

6.4 Nguyen's (2006) real-time analysis of /[characters not reproducible]/ by social status for Detroit African Americans and Nguyen and Anderson's (2006) comparisons of /[characters not reproducible]/ fronting among African American and Midwestern Whites in the Detroit area 87

6.5 Nguyen and Anderson's (2006) comparisons of /u/ fronting among African American and Midwestern Whites in the Detroit area 94

7 The Patterning of /ai/ 102

7.1 Comparison by ethnicity, vowel, and context 105

7.2 Speaker-by-speaker analysis 110

7.2.1 Data overview 110

7.2.2 Statistical analysis 111

7.2.2.1 Main effects 111

7.2.2.2 Interactions of vowel and context 116

7.2.3 Comparison with a Midwestern White speaker 122

7.2.4 Summary of speaker-by-speaker analysis 127

7.3 The patterning of /ai/ in Detroit African American English reported by Nguyen (2006) 127

8 The Local and Supralocal Contexts for the Patterns of Usage 129

8.1 Participant comments on Detroit and its relationship to the suburbs 129

8.1.1 Residential segregation 130

8.1.2 "White Flight" out of Detroit 132

8.1.3 Suburbs 134

8.1.4 Poverty, scarcity of jobs, and crime in Detroit 138

8.1.5 Riots 140

8.1.6 Coleman Young, first African American Mayor of Detroit 142

8.2 Participant comments on migration, the South, and Southern cultural practices 144

8.2.1 Reverse migration and purchasing property in the South 145

8.2.2 Ties to the South: Trips and relatives 149

8.2.3 Southern cultural practices in Detroit 151

8.2.4 Relationship between Southern Whites and Southern African Americans 156

8.2.5 Identification as "Southern" and "Hillbilly" and differentiation between Southern migrants and Midwestern Whites 159

8.2.6 Metapragmatic commentary on language 162

8.3 Interpretation of the results for the patterns of use presented in Chapters 6 and 7 164

8.3.1 /u/ and /[characters not reproducible]/ 166

8.3.2 Comparison of groups for fronting 167

8.3.3 The (non)role of language ideology in the patterning of the high and lower-high back vowels 169

8.4 /ai/ 171

8.4.1 Summary of major patterns for /ai/ 172

8.4.2 /ai/ Glide-weakening and dialect leveling 174

9 Conclusions and Implications 179

9.1 General commentary 179

9.2 Limitations and contributions of the study and implications for sociolinguistic research 181.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 184-192) and index.

ISBN:

0230008860

9780230008861

OCLC:

182662696

Online:

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