This paper investigates variation in the realization of the happy vowel in Manchester, England, that is, the final vowel in happy, baby, etc., which is often described as extremely lax. It is based on the acoustic analysis of 109 speakers, stratified for age, gender, social class, and ethnicity. The vowel is a rarely reported case of a stable vocalic variable, with no change in apparent time but with clear conditioning by social class (with higher social classes having tenser vowels) and by ethnicity. Style-shifting is minimal, statistically insignificant, and appears to result from durational effects; we conclude that the variable lies largely below speakers' conscious awareness within the speech community. We explore the long-standing Labovian hypothesis that internal linguistic constraints operate independently of social factors and find that the results largely support this hypothesis for the happy vowel. This suggests a shared underlying system despite social differentiation in overall vowel realization.
The process of new-dialect formation occurs when speakers of mutually intelligible varieties come into contact and create a new dialect. In this paper, I show that the process of new-dialect formation is underway in South Florida, even though the dialects coming into contact are themselves mostly contact varieties spoken by bilinguals, language learners, and the descendants thereof. This paper examines multiple vocalic variables used by 11- to 13-year-olds to explore the high variability and dialect leveling characteristic of stage two new-dialect formation. Imposition and other direct contact effects are evident within the speech of some bilingual participants, but similar patterns within the speech of monolingual English-speaking participants point to high interspeaker variability. Policing of marked features points to the direction in which leveling may shape this emerging dialect.
In this study, we explored the social predictors of an ongoing sound change in the Twi Advanced Tongue Root harmony system by acoustically examining production variation in a sample of 105 speakers representing urban and traditional localities in Ghana. In the urban locality, the change was evident in all age-groups and near completion in the youngest generation. In the traditional locality, by contrast, the change was evident only in some younger speakers. The effect of gender differed between localities: urban men were more advanced in the change than urban women, whereas traditional speakers showing the change were predominantly women. By reflecting the gender dynamics of societal engagement and contact in Ghana, these findings highlight the importance of local social context for the manifestation of variation and the unique insights of non-Western communities for sociolinguistic theory.
