The sociolinguistic impact of (sub-)urbanization: Mapping /ai/ variation across Houston

[摘要] Major demographic transformations in the United States have shifted the country’spopulation into large urban areas, and have reshaped its dialect boundaries. Despite this,urbanization is a relatively new area of study in regional dialectology. Prior studies haveestablished that linguistic and social factors associated with urban development have aclear impact on language variation and change. Urbanization can lead to the leveling ofdialect differences between urban and rural speakers, as well as the emergence ofinnovative features and norms in the dialects of younger speakers. Studies of thelinguistic impact of urbanization have focused almost exclusively on the speech of ruralor urban communities, however, with the most attention paid to the latter. Very littleresearch has explored the speech of suburban communities in the context of the rural andurban communities that surround them.This study addresses this gap by examining phonetic variation among Anglonatives of Houston’s three most populous counties. The population of these counties hasundergone rapid demographic transformations over the past few decades. Today, theapproximate combined population of these three counties surpasses 5 million people andthe majority of these Houstonians live in suburban neighborhoods. Prominentneighborhood differences exist across this region, however, in terms of the degree ofurbanness, demographics, and community attitudes of its inhabitants. The analysis drawson these socio-geographic insights to explore the social meaning of linguistic variationand the motivations behind participation in local sound change.The linguistic variable analyzed is a well-known feature of sound change in thesouthern U.S. English: the monophthongal or diphthongal production of the vowel /ai/.This vowel is a particularly suitable variable to focus on for examining urbanization inthe South because its variable production has been linked with urbanness in previousresearch. Data come from the speech of 65 Anglos (27 females and 38 males, aged 18-90) who participated in the 2017 Kinder Houston Area Survey, a telephone surveyconducted annually to assess the public opinions of Houston residents.Acoustic phonetic and statistical analyses of /ai/ variation among these speakersshows that Anglos are moving toward the diphthongal realization in apparent time, inparallel with other regions of the South. However, some Anglo speakers still producemonophthongal /ai/, regardless of their age, educational attainment, county of residence,or urbanness. This suggests that variant /ai/ pronunciations may carry important indexicalmeanings in the local community. Speakers orienting to Houston’s traditional linguisticmarket may use traditional linguistic forms as a way to resist innovation and maintaintheir local identity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, speakers orienting to Houston’semerging linguistic market may stigmatize associations with the traditionalmonophthongal /ai/ variant because of its connections with the stereotypical Texasaccent. I show that Spatial GIS analyses of speakers linguistic behavior, together withtheir locations in the city, enables much more nuanced and representative account of thedialectology of Houston at the beginning of the 21st century. Composite GIS mapsshowing the variability of /ai/production among Houstonians indicate the most significantdifferences among speakers from neighborhoods with different urbanness levels. I arguethat these patterns are particularly likely in a city such as Houston, due to its sociogeographiccontext and history of urban development across the community.The sociolinguistic literature contains relatively little work on phonetic variationin the English of suburban speakers, yet urbanization will become increasingly integral tospeaker identities and ideologies of place as rapid urban development continues in the21st century. This study presents a step toward understanding the impact of (sub-)urbanization on local identities and linguistic behavior.

[发布机构] Rice University

[效力级别] sociophonetics