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Prosodic Prominence Perception, Regional Background, Ethnicity and Experience: Naive Perception of African American English and European American English
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Language Variation and the Great Migration: Regionality and African American Language
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Abstract:
The Great Migration of African Americans out of the rural South between 1915 and 1970 is the reason why African American Language (AAL) is found across a wide geographic range in the United States. This massive demographic shift is considered to be one of the most important historical and sociological population movements in North America. Previous work on AAL has overlooked the diachronic regional development of urban AAL in the context of the Great Migration. This dissertation investigates the spread and intensification of AAL during the twentieth century through an analysis of regional variation and change in Washington DC, focusing on sound change internal to the variety (Fought 2013). It focuses on a single sociolinguistic variable, word final /d/, which, in AAL, has several phonetic realizations, including the glottal stop, coronal stop, and outright deletion. The glottal stop variant is a geographically widespread feature of modern AAL. To better understand the development of AAL, I draw on conversational interview data from several communities with African American populations: Memphis, Tennessee, Washington DC, Princeville, North Carolina, and Rochester, New York. These specific communities represent important historical and geographic contexts, including an older rural Southern community (Princeville), and urban communities which were greatly affected by the Great Migration in both the South (Memphis, DC) and North (Rochester). Results show regional differentiation, including a North and South distinction and an urban and rural one. An analysis of change over time in Washington DC further identifies that the glottal variant is increasing over time while the deleted variant is stable. This dissertation is driven by a set of research questions designed to broaden the understanding of how AAL developed during the twentieth century by incorporating multiple communities in the analysis and better understanding the sociohistorical context of those communities. These findings demonstrate the unique conditions that allowed AAL to develop and flourish as a variety of English. I hope this research expands how sociolinguists view AAL and regional variation more broadly and demonstrates the utility in focusing on the role of such community-specific sociohistorical patterns on language development.
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Keyword:
African American Language; Sociolinguistics; Sociophonetics; Sound Change
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URL: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/24866
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Speech Rate, Pause, and Linguistic Variation: an Examination through the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project
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