Lecture 8

Lecture 8 --  Summary Outline

Language and Society: What Your Speech Says about You

By Valerie Fridland

Your Shifty Vowels

Almost all major dialects of American English are undergoing massive

changes in their vowels. These changes differ from region to region

nd among ethnic and age groups in different regions. Because most

of the people we talk to speak the same dialect we do, we notice differences

only when they are unusual to us. These latest vowel shifts are not the first to

affect English, but they certainly represent some of the most striking changes

to our speech in quite some time. Perhaps most surprisingly, American

speech is becoming less similar, not more similar, regionally. In this lecture,

we’ll explore how vowel articulation comes to mark social differences, and

we’ll learn about vowel production.

I. Modern Vowel Shifts

A. Linguists have been studying vowel movements, often referred

to as vowel shows, since isolated vowel changes were first noted

in the 1970s. However, the extensive and interrelated shifts that

we currently recognize in U.S. dialects were not really identified

until the early 1990s as interrelated shift patterns. We also find that

Canada is being affected by vowel shifts that are different than

those in the United States.

B. We often think of regionally diagnostic terms or words as the main

markers of where a person is from-such terms as “y’alI” versus

“youse guys” or “soda” versus “pop.” However, vowel pronunciation

actually plays a more extensive role in making someone sound

like a Southerner, Westerner, or Northerner than we tend to think.

Despite this, we are rarely able to articulate exactly what the

differences in vowel sounds are.

C. Although speech samples from speakers in different parts of the

country sound different, pinpointing specifically what differs

among them is difficult. You might notice a particular word or two

that stand out as distinctive, but it isn’t the word that’s different; it’s

the way the vowels in it sound.

D. Obvious markers of region, such as y’aII or totally rad, make a

clear social claim Vowel sounds, in contrast, are typically below

the level of conscious awareness. Changes in vowel sounds are not

usually even noticed by those shifting them. Eventually, when we

meet people outside of our dialect region that don’t shift in the same

way, we may notice that they pronounce their vowels strangely,

but we probably don’t realize that they are thinking the same thing

about us.

E. Vowel shifts can progress rapidly across age, gender, and regional

groups without meeting the social roadblocks that many more

obvious language differences meet. For example, you don’t usually

hear people comment on the way someone else pronounces his or

her vowels, but the substitution of /v/ for /th/ or the deletion of an

/r/ (as in “brovah” instead of “brother”) is often seen as salient.

II. Vowel Articulation

A. Why is it that vowel articulation is so much more subtle yet makes

such a difference?

1.  Vowel sounds are produced along somewhat of a continuum

in the mouth. There are fuzzy areas between what constitutes

different vowel qualities for speakers in different regions.

2. We can make an iw/ sound (as in cat) either raised (“ce-aet”)

or retracted (“cuht”) but still have someone understand that we

are saying cat. We then start to identify this subtle variation

with social distinctions.

3. For example, if Great Aunt Mary says “caht” while our

children say “ce-act,” this distinction may come to signal

age differences when we hear it, even though we may not

recognize it consciously. Yet again, we see how language-in

this case, vowel articulation-subtly indicates and reinforces

social categories-in this case, old versus young.

B. ln contrast to other speech sounds, vowels vary quite a bit, and

this variation provides us with an effective yet still linguistically

comprehensible way to recognize social differences.

1. Though there is some variation in how they are produced,

consonants are less variable than vowels. In general, to

make a consonant sound, you have to hit specific targets in a

particular way.

2. Vowels are a more relational kind of articulation. If you make

a vowel sound a bit higher or lower in the mouth compared

to someone else, it doesn’t matter so much as long as you are

making it distinct from other vowel sounds. This continuous

rather than clear-cut distinction between vowel sounds makes

it harder to recognize exactly how the sound is different unless

you are linguistically trained.

3. But these subtle differences that simply develop through

shared use by a regional or ethnic group are then identified

as social indicators. Again, as we’ve been exploring with

language development more generally, we see that our

speech is a result of both social and linguistic pressures that

are a reflection of where we come from and who we speak

with most.

III. Vowel Normalization and Social Differences

A. Vowels are essentially created by vibrations within the vocal tract;

thus, the size of the vocal tract makes a difference in terms of the

frequencies produced by the shaping of the airflow through it. The

process people use to understand another speaker’s vowels when

they sound different is vowel normalization.

1. Normalization processes seem to be most efficient when

there is talker familiarity. That means that the more you

hear a particular speaker, the quicker and more efficiently

you normalize his or her speech. This is the reason you

understand the speech of those you talk to most often more

readily than those with whom you may not have much

experience speaking.

2. Normalization may make it seem that variations in vowel

sounds are not very significant-because listeners are able

to accommodate for them. But when an entire group or

community starts to vary its vowel production in the same

way overtime, then the target for that vowel for children may

become shifted toward a new norm

3. The community as a hole changes in a linguistically patterned

way that opens up the opportunity for that shift to become a

marker of a particular social identity. Speakers outside that

community don’t shift consistently or at all toward the new

target, leading to a potentially socially significant difference

among groups of speakers.

B. Why might people start to produce a sound in a systematically

different way than they originally heard it? It seems that young

people are the critical link in introducing innovations into a

community’s speech.

1. Adolescence favors social forces beyond class, including

the need for autonomy and independence. These are forces

that are often not as relevant as we age. Although adults are

economically status conscious, teenagers are status conscious

based on other factors. Athletic ability, urbanness, coolness-

all these are critical during maturation, as is the need to express

separation from adult norms.

2. These factors, it seems, help drive vowel changes, among other

types of changes. We will explore more about language and

youth in a later lecture, but we typically End that it is younger

people who are most advanced in sound changes entering a

community.

C. If several communities adopt new norms for vowel production

over time-and do so in different ways-we end up with socially

diagnostic vowels indicative of membership in those communities.

This is exactly what seems to be happening in regional U.S. dialects

today. At the same time, some of the new positions for other vowels

in American English seem to be in the process of dialect leveling,

or losing local differentiation.

D. Because the same vowel sounds reoccur in many of the words we

use, any shift in vowel pronunciation generally affects the way we

say all words containing that vowel sound. A shift in our vowels

can, thus, drastically change a language over time.

IV. Vowel Production

A. Most American dialects have about ll single vowel sounds and 3

main diphthongs, although this inventory varies a bit depending

on a speaker’s dialect and on what is counted as a separate

vowel sound. These sounds are made by moving the tongue

front and back and up and down and by rounding or spreading

the lips. These movements create different shapes in the mouth,

which in ttn‘n create different resonances in the airflow that we

hear as different vowel sounds. This is what linguists refer to as

vowel qualities.

B. When discussing how we make vowel sounds, we typically refer to

a number of concurrent factors: tongue position (front or back of the

tongue lifted high, mid, or low in the mouth), jaw position (opened

or closed), and lip position (rounded or spread). The movements

of the tongue and lips work together to essentially make a tube.

Air moving through vibrates at different resonances, depending

on the shape made with this tube. Different shapes create different

vowel sounds.

C. We can more easily understand how these elements work together

by thinking about how vowel sounds are produced in the mouth.

Linguists typically arrange vowels on a trapezoid-shaped chart.

Vowels produced at the front part of the mouth are represented on

the left of the chart (toward the hypothetical open part of the mouth),

and vowels produced at the back of the mouth are represented on

the right side of the chart. The charts below show the front and back

vowel subsystems.

D. Vowel shifting is part of the history of every language and results

in significant changes over time in the way sounds are pronounced.

Part of what makes vowel shifts have such an impact on the way

language systems develop is because of the interconnectedness of

the vowel space.

1. A change in the articulation of one vowel can encroach on the

way another vowel is produced. Or the movement of one vowel

can open up possibilities for another vowel sound to move into

the articulatory space it previously occupied.

2. This kind of simultaneous related shifting is called a vowel

chain shift, and such chain shifts can radically reorganize the

vowel space of a language or dialect. Indeed, such vowel shifts

result in the development of longstanding linguistic divergence

because they often affect which vowel categories are perceived

in a language.

E.As we know, English has shifted quite a bit over time-from its

Germanic vowel qualities to Old English, then to Middle English,

and finally to Modern English vowel categories. Now it seems as if

our vowels are shifting yet again.