Lauren Hall-LewStanford University

LSA 2009

ethnicity & region Increasing number of studies on regional

variation and African American Language varieties (Thomas 1989; Anderson 2002; Fridland 2003b; Childs & Mallinson 2004; Eberhart 2008a)

Few studies on Asian American English varieties, fewer still on regional variation (but see Wong 2007)

Todayindices of Asianness & California sound change

○ one variable of each○ the interaction of the two

neighborhood San Francisco

Sunset District

You are here!

neighborhood 98,450 residents 43% White 51% Asian

○ 77% of those are Chinese

52% speak a language other than English at home

neighborhood Location

“The Great Sand Bank”westernmost edge of The West

Social historyaffordable single-family homesupwardly-mobile San Franciscans

Identities & Ideologiespride, local authenticity

the neighborhood (1900)

the neighborhood (1936)

the neighborhood (2008)

neighborhood & ethnicity Identities & Ideologies

Mission Irish Chinatown Chinese

Sociolinguistic consequencescommunity ideologies may transcend ethnicity1.ethnic indices may take on local meanings2.regional variables may not vary with ethnicity

neighborhood & ethnicity Identities & Ideologies

Asian/Chinese local & authentic

Mary, European American, age 29“All I wanted to be when I was 13 was a 5-foot tall Asian

girl who could break dance!”

April, European American, age 18“The only thing really- that kind of sucks is that, like my

family doesn't give out, like money in [red] envelopes, which I think they should start doing, but um, (laughter) yeah. I- I- 'Cause that was, that was, a lot, that was, that was a big part of like, you know, what I was like exposed to growing up, so, I got kind of, you know, used to it. Like that was my, that was with my element.”

fieldwork January — June 2008 88 sociolinguistic interviews

1-on-1 in homes or offices30min biographical history30min neighborhood attitudes1pg reading passage1pg list of 80 minimal pairs

Semi-ethnographic participant-observation

speaker inclusion living in the Sunset since at least age 5

so all at least 2nd generation American speaking English as their primary

language since at least age 5

or, living in SF since birth, in the Sunset for several decades, and currentlyonly used for speakers age 50+

speakers analyzed interview data only 24 speakers stratified for age, ethnicity, M/F

variables vocalization of /l/

○ Emiko, Japanese American, age 65Where I went to school there was, like…

○ Emily, Chinese American, age 37…market, with cold cereal, ya know, a

butcher shop…

fronting of /uw/ and /ow/○ April, European American, age 18

I kind of associate that…○ Monica, Chinese American, age 16

Yeah I do, uh…

L-vocalization Change-in-progress in other U.S. locations

(Pittsburgh, McElhinny 1999; Philadelphia, Ash 1982; Ohio AAVE & EAE, Fix 2004 & 2008; Dodsworth 2006)

& other English speaking communities(NZ & Australia, Horvath & Horvath 2002; SE UK, Johnson & Britain 2006)

Not previously documented in the West or in San Francisconot present in DeCamp 1953, who looked at 22 White & 3 Black speakers

L-vocalization method

L-vocalization method social factors

Asian American* vs. European American*○ language use (before age 5 & currently)○ immigration generation (2-4)

age, & M vs. F phonological factors

coda vs. coda-cluster; syllabic vs. non-syllabicpreceding & following environment

*Most Asian Americans in this sample are Chinese American, but some are Japanese American or part Korean or part Filipino.Most European Americans in this sample do not specify a particular ethnicity, aside from Irish Americans, whose productions were not significantly different.

L-vocalization results

L-vocalization summary

back vowel fronting Known feature of California English

(Luthin 1987, Hagiwara 1997) Known conditioning environments:

preceding apicals (TOO) promote fronting of /uw/ and are separate from other environments (BOOT)

following nasals inhibit fronting of /ow/ and were excluded from the current analysis

following liquids (COOL, BOWL) inhibit fronting of both /uw/ & /ow/ and are separate in this analysis

back vowel fronting

*Same calculation for post-apical, or ‘TOO’, vowels

fronting results: BOAT

Age

% front

Age is a significant correlate at p < 0.05

Monica

Jane

(BEET)

(BOWL)

fronting results: TOO

Age

% front

Age is NOT a significant correlate, nor is ethnicity;there is a slight trend for Females > Males at p < 0.09

Jane

fronting results: BOOT

Age

% front

Age is NOT a significant correlate, nor is sex or ethnicity

Jane

back vowel fronting summary /ow/

age stratificationchange-in-progressno gender differencesno ethnic differences

/uw/no age stratificationphonological conditioningsuggestive gender difference within post-apicalsno ethnic differences

back vowel backing Variable production of backed back vowels

Examples:○ …people who have…○ …I don’t know, like…

Possible interference with sound change? Irregular and infrequent use, across most

speakers in the sample Social meaning??

Possible links to ethnicity are not borne out Links to types of strong affect seem likely

(Eckert 2008), but what’s the impact on fronting?

interaction Might vocalization motivate fronting?

(Labov 1994: 332; cited in Thomas 2001: 56)pre-L (TOOL) vowel class vs. other (TOO, TOOT)

vowel class Dodsworth 2005:

“a subtle pattern in the opposite direction” The Sunset District:

vocalization ≠ change in progressfronting = change in progressbut vocalization most frequent after back, round

vowels

results

ethnicity & region The Sunday’s social history & positionality Ethnic practices indexical of local authenticity ‘Ethnic’ practices available to the wider

neighborhood community; regional practices available to all ethnicities

Complicates the notion of a single regional dialect distinct from ethnolects

Rather, place and ethnicity intertwined through local meanings, co-indexed in speech

thanksPenny Eckert, John Rickford, Meghan Sumner, Miyako Inoue, Rebecca Starr, Rebecca Greene, Laura Staum Casasanto, Stacy Lewis, Katie Drager, Douglas Kenter, Rachel Cristy, Tyler Kendall, Robin Dodsworth, Sonya Fix, Bartek Plichta, Liz Coppock, Mary Rose, Rob Podesva, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Carmen Fought, Malcah Yaeger-Dror,

& the gracious residents past and present of San Francisco’s Sunset District

sources citedAnderson, Bridget. 2002. “Dialect leveling and /ai/ monophthongization among African American Detroiters.” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 6, 86-

98.11

Childs, Becky, & Mallinson, Christine. 2004. “African American English in Appalachia: Dialect accommodation and substrate influence.” English World-Wide, 251, 27-50.

DeCamp, David. 1953 [1971]. “The pronunciation of English in San Francisco.” In Williamson and Burke, eds. A various language: perspectives on American dialects. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 549-569

Robin Dodsworth, Bartlomiej Plichta & David Durian. 2006. An Acoustic Study of Columbus /l/ Vocalization. NWAV 36.

Dodsworth, Robin. 2005a. Attribute networking: A technique for modeling social perceptions. Journal of sociolinguistics 9, 2.: 226-254.

Dodsworth, Robin. 2005b. Linguistic Variation And Sociological Consciousness. PhD Dissertation, Dept of Linguistics, The Ohio State University.

Eberhardt, Maeve. 2008a. “The Low-Back Merger in the Steel City: African American English and Pittsburgh Speech.” American Speech, 833, 284-311.

Eckert, Penelope. 2008. “Getting emotional about social meaning in variation.” Paper presented at NWAV 37, Nov. 8, 2008, in Houston, TX

Fix, Sonya. 2008. “Beyond stereotypes: white women, black worlds, linguistic variation and style.” NWAV 37, Nov. 8, 2008, in Houston, TX

Fix, Sonya. 2004. “/l/ vocalization and racial integration of social networks: Sociolinguistic variation among whites in a Columbus, Ohio community.” Poster presented at NWAV 33, Oct. 1, 2003, Ann Arbor, MI

Fridland, Valerie. 2003b. 'Tie, tied and tight': The expansion of /ai/ monophthongization in African-American and European-American speech in Memphis, Tennessee. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 73, 279-298

Hinton, Leanne, Sue Bremmer, Hazel Corcoran, Jean Learner, Herb Luthin, Birch Moonwomon, and Mary van Clay. 1987. “It’s not just Valley Girls: A study of California English.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 13: 117-127.

Labov, William. 1994. Principles of linguistic change. Volume 1, Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.

Luthin, Herbert W. 1987. “The Story of California /ow/: The Coming-of-Age of English in California.” Denning, Keith M. et al., (eds.) Variation in Language NWAV-XV at Stanford: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation.

Moonwomon, Birch. 1992. “Sound Change in San Francisco English.” PhD Dissertation, Dept of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley

Thomas, Erik R. 2001. An acoustic analysis of vowel variation in New World English. Publication of the American Dialect Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Thomas, Erik. 1989 [1993]. Vowel changes in Columbus, Ohio. Journal of English Linguistics, 222, 205-215.

fieldwork nitty gritty contacting speakers

1. Sunset Newsletter / Community Center ads2. friend-of-friend / snowball technique3. other techniques yielded just a couple

people

semi-ethnographic activities neighborhood meetings community festivals, historic walks merchant association meetings public libraries, parks, recreational areas

neighborhood & speakers

fieldwork nitty gritty equipment

Zoom H2 solid state recorder○ built-in microphone, 90° unidirectional

input, ‘mono mix’ of stereo default44.1 kHz sampling frequency,

downsampled on Audacity to 11 kHz for analysis

backup recording made on laptop using Macintosh iBook built-in microphone, recorded onto Audacity at 11 kHz

vocalization nitty gritty token inclusion criteria

minimum duration V+/l/ = 60msmin 5 tokens / environment & max 5 tokens of the same

lexical item / ~30 tokens per personexcluded: ambisyllabic /l/, /_l/ before /l_/, known variable

tokens like palm, folk, etc. other statistical concerns

syllabic vs. other○ need to re-run stats without syllabic tokens to really know what’s

going on with effects from preceding vowel features and coda vs. coda-cluster environments

○ also, syllabic tokens can’t currently be dealt with using available acoustic methods (Dodsworth et al. 2006)

skewing by high frequency tokens:○ e.g., occurrences of school, alone, are potentially responsible

for results for [+high] [+back]

fronting nitty-gritty at least 10 tokens of each vowel

at least 5 tokens per phonological environment onset taken after 2nd vocal pulse; offset taken

at 2nd-to-last vocal pulse minimum duration 50ms formant values taken using LPC via Akustyk

for Praat (Plichta 2006) subset (~10%) of tokens checked by hand Lobanov Speaker Extrinsic means calculated

using NORM (Thomas & Kendall 2007)

other lx variables Other California Vowel Shift variables:

low back vowel merger (analysis in progress) lowering of /ɛ/ to /æ/raising of /æN/ & backing of /æ/ elsewhere

Other ‘Asian American’ variables:final /θ/ /f/ (2 speakers, categorical)final stop deletion (impressionistic)rate-of-speech variance

Potential ‘Irish American’ variable:CAR-CORE merger

Some ‘tough guy’ (Mission/Chinatown) variables! initial /θ, ð/ /t, d/strong initial /r/

other social variables immigration history details

heritage country / region language background

subsequent exposure & regular use if Chinese, what Chinese dialect / language?

childhood experience friendship cohorts = mixed- or monoracial?

current network composition native SF/Sunset residents vs. others ethnicity; immigrant vs. American born

attitudes toward Asians attitudes toward neighborhood change attitudes toward Asian-accented Englishes religion & private vs. public school