. a.
c1193”... .II.
3. 53.- q 111'

k .

.
2 ,5...
..

2..
ﬁn. is. ﬁns .

. .220

 

 

I A)? .1
[n.3, v
3.4.3.: (.

 

.vu .(. 4..tvl.§
cl). -.an.

inrix‘V
3... .....!..‘A!,x}
: _. (t.

 

v. ‘ ,
. I :ibi'tll 55.1.?

LIBRARY
Michigan State
University

This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

Ethnicity and Sound Change:

Mexican American Accommodation to the Northern Cities Shift

Ph.D.

in Lansing, Michigan

presented by

Rebecca Virginia Roeder

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for the

degree in the Department of Linguistics,
Germanic, Slavic, Asian and

African Languages

 

 

 

 

/ VMajWEsW
v’jnﬁ, JR :1; OOQ)

Date

MSU is an Afﬁrmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
To AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

 

gigw mm

 

940;! 1 1100

 

(03021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2/05 pJClRCIDaleDueindd-pJ

 

ETHNICITY AND SOUND CHANGE:
MEXICAN AMERICAN ACCOMMODATION TO THE
NORTHERN CITIES SHIFT IN LANSING, MICHIGAN

By

Rebecca V. Roeder

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Linguistics, Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages

2006

 

.\lr

pror

Speak

mcm:I

 

COmn
Slalis‘; I
51$ 51in
IDdlCa
“leg 5

fmm x

 

ABSTRACT

ETHNICITY AND SOUND CHANGE: MEXICAN AMERICAN ACCOMMODATION
TO THE NORTHERN CITIES SHIFT IN LANSING, MICHIGAN

By
Rebecca Virginia Roeder
This dissertation explores issues of language and dialect contact as they affect
Mexican American speakers of English in Lansing, Michigan. Michigan is in the middle
of a region labeled the Inland North by Labov, Ash and Boberg (2005), and the
mainstream dialect in this area is characterized by a vowel change in progress known as
the Northern Cities Shift (N CS). This thesis investigates 1) the degree to which Mexican

Americans who have lived in Lansing for all or most of their lives have acquired an NCS

pronunciation of the four vowels /2e, 8, a, o/ and 2) whether the effects of adjacent

phonetic environment Show any previously unattested patterns for the vowel /ae/. These
topics are addressed separately, although the results of the investigation of coarticulatory
effects reﬂect NCS inﬂuence.

In the ﬁrst portion of the analysis, which uses wordlist data from thirty-two
speakers, the focus is on the nature and extent of sociolinguistic stratiﬁcation among the
members of this group, who are examined as a uniﬁed minority group speech
community. The ﬁrst and second formant values of these vowels are analyzed
statistically, in addition to duration for the vowel /ae/, for the effects of social factors such
as age, sex, generation of residence in Michigan and socioeconomic status. Results
indicate that women under 45, particularly those who have lived in Lansing their entire
lives, have acquired NCS /ae/. Pronunciations of the other three vowels diverge somewhat

from NCS norms, however, even among the youngest women, leading to the conclusion

cc
Fi
Spt
lhi:
Sigr
cou:
en\i
Thcs
emir
phon

Refer
Labﬂw

 

Labox

Thun‘

 

 

that distinct norms of pronunciation have developed within this minority speech
community. Evidence regarding substrate influence from Spanish on the dialect of these
speakers is inconclusive.

In the second portion of the analysis, which uses wordlist data from only the
sixteen speakers who are both lifelong residents of Michigan and native speakers of
English, focus is on coarticulatory effects in the pronunciation of /ze/. Results are
compared to ﬁndings from previous sociophonetic and laboratory phonology studies.
Findings show dramatic raising of /ae/ pre-nasally—a feature that is prevalent in NCS
speech—in female respondents under 25, supporting the conclusion that young women in
this speech community have fully acquired NCS /a=:/. T-tests show no statistically
signiﬁcant raising of /a:/ before nasals in the other ten speakers, however, providing a
counterexample to Labov’s hypothesis that some raising of /&/ in a pre-nasal
environment occurs in almost every dialect Of American English (Labov 1994: 197).
These results concur with Thomas (2001), who found a lack of /a3/-raising in a pre-nasal
environment in Mexican American Speakers of English in Texas. Results for other
phonetic environments agree with previous ﬁndings.

References
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 1, Internal Factors.

Language in Society 20. Oxford: Blackwell.

Labov, William, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg. 2005. The Atlas of North American
English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Thomas, Erik. 2001. An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English.
Publication of the American Dialect Society 85. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.

For my father

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deep gratitude goes to the generous people of Lansing, Michigan, who agreed to be
interviewed for this project and who shared their time and life stories with me, and to Dr.
Dennis Preston, who is a model of the type of scholar and mentor that I aspire to be and

who is tireless in his dedication to his students.

In addition, I would like to acknowledge my appreciation for the advice generously
offered to me by Dr. Anne Violin-Wigent, who diligently read and commented on my
thesis, and the members of my PhD Committee—Drs. David Dwyer, Grover Hudson,
Yen Hwei Lin, and Brad Rakerd—whose doors were always open for questions and

whose answers were always helpful and well informed.

In this, as in all of my endeavors, I am profoundly appreciative of my family and friends

for the love, encouragement and much needed perspective they provide.

This work was made possible in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation
(BCS-0444349) that supported a research project in which I have participated as an

investigator.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the creators of the speech software

programs Akustyk and Praat, which continue to be indispensable to my work.

 

Llf

#(JJ'Jt—JI

CHI
3.] (,3

331:

'h

 

‘1

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................. viii
LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................. ix
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................ 1
1.1 Project Goals..... ........................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Sociophonetics aS Applied to Ethnic Minority Dialects ..................................... 3
1.3 Mexican American Migration ................................................................... 5
1.4 Ethnic Minority Dialects in the United States ............................................................... 5
1.4.1 First Language Acquisition ............................................................................. 6
1.4.2 African American English .............................................................................. 8
1.4.3 Mexican American English ........................................................... 9
1.5 Overview of the Dissertation ................................................................... 14
CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY ................................................................. 15
2.1 Physical and Linguistic Setting ................................................................. 15
2.2 Mexican Americans in Lansing ............................................................... 22
2.3 Participants ....................................................................................... 23
2.3.1 Demographic Constants ............................................................. 25
2.3.2 Independent Social Variables ...................................................... 26
2.4 Field Work and Data Handling and Processing ............................................. 28
2.5 Linguistic Inﬂuences ............................................................................ 30
2.5.1 Northern Cities Shifted English ................................................... 32
2.5.2 Older Rural Michigan Speech ...................................................... 33
2.5.3 Mexican American English in Texas .............................................. 37
2.5.4 Spanish ................................................................................ 40
2.6 Summary ........................................................................................... 43
CHAPTER 3: STATISTICAL RESULTS ...................................................... 44
3.1 Generation and Socioeconomic Status ......................................................... 47
3.2 Linguistic Background as a Variable .......................................................... 48
3.3 Age ................................................................................................. 50
3.3.1 Results for /&/ ........................................................................ 50
3.3.2 Results for /e/ .......................................................................... 56
3.3.3 Results for /a/ ......................................................................... 67
3.3.4 Results for /o/ .......................................................................... 72
3.4 Summary ........................................................................................... 78
CHAPTER 4: INFLUENCE OF PHONETIC ENVIRONMENT ON THE
PRODUCTION OF /a/ ............................................................................. 81
4.1 Previous Research .............................................................................. 81

vi

4.2 The Study ........................................................................................ 84

4.3 Phonetic Conditioning of /ae/ .................................................................. 88
4.3.] Following Manner and Voice ...................................................... 91
4.3.2 Preceding Manner and Voice ...................................................... 96
4.3.3 Preceding Place of Articulation ................................................... 98
4.4 Conclusions ..................................................................................... 100
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ................................................................... 102
5.1 Identity and Language ......................................................................... 102
5.2 Concluding Remarks .......................................................................... 107
5.3 Areas of Future Research ..................................................................... 109
APPENDIX A—WORDLIST .................................................................... 112
APPENDIX B—INDICES OF SOCIAL STATUS ............................................ 114
APPENDIX C—INTERVIEW QUESTIONS .................................................. 116
APPENDIX D—LOCATION OF RESPONDENTS’ HOME CITIES/COUNTIES IN
TEXAS AND HOME CITIES/STATES IN MEXICO ................... 118
APPENDIX E—SUMMARY OF RESPONDENTS’ LINGUISTIC BACKGROUNDS..
........................................................................................................ 119
APPENDIX F—PLOTS OF NORMALIZED MEAN FORMANT VALUES FOR ALL
32 RESPONDENTS .......................................................... 122
REFERENCES ..................................................................................... 155

vii

 

 

 

 

Tail

Tab
Tab]
(:1 ll}

 

Tab
Tab
Tabi

Tab

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1: List of Participants ..................................................................... 24
Table 2.2: Cell distribution across sex, socioeconomic status and birthplace ............... 26
Table 2.3: Cell distribution across age and sex ................................................. 28
Table 3.1: Cell distribution across sex and linguistic background ........................... 49
Table 4.1: Relative positions of /$/ and /e/ in native speakers of MI English .............. 86

Table 4.2: Ranked list of the inﬂuence of consonantal environment on the production of
/m/, based on the combined ﬁndings of Labov (1994), Ito (1999), Evans (2001) and Jones

(2003) ................................................................................................. 89
Table 4.3: Following Manner and Voice Features and Words ................................ 91
Table 4.4: Results for Raising of /a:/ Before Nasal Consonants .............................. 92
Table 4.5: Preceding Manner and Voice Features and Words ................................. 97
Table 4.6: Preceding Place of Articulation Features and Words .............................. 98

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1: The Northern Cities Shift (NCS) (based on Labov 1994: 191) ................. 16

Figure 2.2: Normalized means for female Detroit speakers, ages 19-25, interviewed in
1995 (data from Preston, personal communication) ............................................ 32

Figure 2.3: Vowel chart of a 50-year-old Anglo man from Gaylord, MI, interviewed in

1970 (data from DARE ﬁles, chart from Ito 1999: 55) ........................................ 34
Figure 2.4: Vowel chart of a middle-aged Anglo woman from Gaylord, MI, interviewed
in 1970 (data from DARE ﬁles, chart from Ito 1999: 55) ...................................... 36
Figure 2.5: Vowel chart of a 31-year-old Mexican American woman from San Antonio,
TX, interviewed in 1992 (modiﬁed from Thomas 2001: 189) ................................ 38
Figure 2.6: Mean scores of Spanish vowels for four men from Madrid

(data from Bradlow 1995: 1918) .................................................................. 42
Figure 3.1: Normalized means for all 32 respondents .......................................... 44

Figure 3.2: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 290)
Dependent variable = normalized F2 /$/ ........................................................ 52

Figure 3.3: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 290)
Dependent variable = normalized F1 /ze/ ........................................................ 54

Figure 3.4: Results for male respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 319)
Dependent variable = normalized F1 /ze/ ......................................................... 55

Figure 3.5: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 102)

Dependent variable = normalized F1 /e/ .......................................................... 57
Figure 3.6: Vowel chart of a 31-year-old Mexican American woman from San Antonio,

TX, interviewed in 1992 (modiﬁed from Thomas 2001: 189) ................................ 59
Figure 3.7: Vowel chart for Simona, age 59, came to M1 from TX at 24 ................... 61

Figure 3.8: Spectrographic images of words spoken by Simona, age 59, ﬁrst generation
......................................................................................................... 62

Figure 3.9: Spectrographic images of words spoken by Lucy, age 14, second generation
......................................................................................................... 62

ix

 

 

 

 

Fi
Dc

Fig

Fig

U
(I.
L

 

 

Figure 3.10: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 102)
Dependent variable = normalized F2 /e/ ........................................................... 64

Figure 3.11: Average F2 of /e/ by age group and sex (N = 221) .............................. 66

Figure 3.12: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 186);
Dependent variable = normalized F2 /0/ .......................................................... 67

Figure 3.13: Normalized means for female Mexican American respondents. (N=l 58). . .74

Figure 3.14: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 335)

Dependent variable = normalized Fl /o/; Dependent variable = normalized F2 /o/. . . . . ...75
Figure 3.15: Average F1 of/o/ by age group and sex (N = 335) .............................. 77
Figure 4.1: Vowel chart for Solana, 22, third generation. Pre-nasal /£/ = EN .............. 93
Figure 4.2: Plotnik chart of /ae/ tokens for Solana, age 22, third generation ................ 94
Figure 6.1: Andy, age 14, second generation ................................................... 122
Figure 6.2: Ronald B, age 16, second generation .............................................. 123
Figure 6.3: Isaiah, age 27, moved to Michigan from Mexico City at 14 .................... 124
Figure 6.4: Rodolfo, age 27, second generation ............................................... 125
Figure 6.5: Rene, age 27, moved to Michigan from Weslaco, Texas. at 10 ............... 126
Figure 6.6: Jesse, age 28, third generation ...................................................... 127
Figure 6.7: Melito, age 29, third generation .................................................... 128
Figure 6.8: Jose, age 35, second generation .................................................... 129

Figure 6.9: Ralph, age 41 , second generation .................................................. 130
Figure 6.10: Laurence, age 41, moved to Michigan from San Benito, Texas. at 4........ 131

Figure 6.11: Rafael, age 43, second generation ................................................. 132
Figure 6.12: Edmund, age 45, second generation .............................................. 133
Figure 6.13: Martin, age 47, moved to Michigan from Sinton, Texas, at 1 ................ 134

 

Figu
Figur
Flgm-
Figur

FIQUr
at 17

 

FigUrI

 

 

Figure 6.14:

Jack, age 49, second generation .................................................. 135

Figure 6.15: Gilberto, age 54, born in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, Mexico; moved to south
Texas (area not speciﬁed) at 4, then to Michigan at 24 ....................................... 136
Figure 6.16: Terence, age 56, moved to Michigan from Seguin, Texas at 22 ............. 137
Figure 6.17: Walter, age 71, moved to Michigan from Eagle Pass, Texas at 3 ............ 138
Figure 6.18: Lucy B, age 14, second generation ............................................... 139
Figure 6.19: Melinda H, age 16, third generation ............................................. 140
Figure 6.20: Estela, age 17, third generation ................................................... 141
Figure 6.21: Lola, age 19, moved to Michigan from Mexico City at 10 ................... 142
Figure 6.22: Emelia, age 20, second generation ............................................... 143
Figure 6.23: Judith, age 21. second generation ................................................ 144
Figure 6.24: Solana T, age 22, third generation ................................................ 145
Figure 6.25: Ana, age 28, third generation ..................................................... 146
Figure 6.26: Sabina H, age 35, second generation ............................................. 147
Figure 6.27: Cynthia, age 39, moved to Michigan from Robstown, Texas, at 21 .........148
Figure 6.28: Loretta B, age 40, moved to Michigan from Seguin, Texas at 10 ............ 149
Figure 6.29: Melissa, age 42, moved to Michigan from San Antonio, Texas at 10. . .....150
Figure 6.30: Mabel, age 45, second generation ................................................ 151
Figure 6.31: Madeleine, age 47, moved to Michigan from Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico
at 12 .................................................................................................. 152
Figure 6.32: Simona H, age 59, moved to Michigan from Laredo, Texas, at 24 ......... 153

xi

 

pnu
mat
pron
Mao
Whicl
man

met}

 

Noni.

and 1

 

Pﬁmt

abOVe

SFSIQ‘n'

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

1.1 Project Goals
The main goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the discussion among
sociophoneticians about the inﬂuence of local majority group norms on ethnic minority
Speech communities, speciﬁcally when such a community has a second language
background. While previous studies have found both assimilation and resistance to
assimilation in the Speech of members of ethnic minority groups, the results presented
here support the hypothesis articulated most clearly by Denning (1989) that both may
occur simultaneously. Results from this study indicate that a child born and raised in an
ethnic minority speech community may fully acquire majority group characteristics in the
pronunciation of one or more vowels — including the low-level phonetic complexity
that marks a native speaker of the dialect — but yet diverge from the mainstream in the
pronunciation of one or more other vowels in ways that reﬂect the minority group’s
history and linguistic norms. A corollary to this ﬁnding is the hypothesis that the order in
which members of an ethnic minority speech community accommodate to local
mainstream pronunciation features does not necessarily match the original order in which
the changes in question entered the local dialect.

This study explores the impact of the local sound change in progress known as the
Northern Cities Shift (NCS) on the speech of Mexican Americans in Lansing, Michigan,

and the analysis is presented in two parts. The ﬁrst part provides results for the

pronunciation of the four vowels /ae, e, o, 3/ across social categories. As mentioned

above, ﬁndings Show that speakers can accommodate completely to some aspects of a

system while failing to accommodate to others. This result highlights the advantages Of

examining speech systematically, instead of focusing on the production of only one
phoneme.

The ﬁndings also underscore Labov’s notion that the speech community, not the
individual speaker, is the primary unit of investigation in sociolinguistics (Weinreich,
Labov and Herzog 1968; Labov 2001: 34). The vowel conﬁguration that emerges from
this research is very similar across speakers, as opposed to being found in the speech of
only a few individuals. Since this pattern differs from majority group norms, and because
those interviewed also share major demographic features (discussed in Section 2.3), the
claim can be made that these speakers belong to the same speech community.l Any
generalizations about the speech of this group would be lost if the focus was on the
individual alone. Perhaps more importantly, membership in a speech community is the
most plausible explanation for the unexpected pattern, not just a convenient label for the
group being analyzed. The group studied here has become a community, with its own
norms of speech that are passed on and hinder assimilation by the larger society.

The second part of the analysis presented here is a detailed account of the effects
of phonetic environment on the pronunciation of /&/. The results provide evidence of full
accommodation to the local majority group pronunciation of this vowel by speakers who
show a lack of assimilation to the mainstream in their pronunciation of other vowels. The
ﬁndings presented in this section also demonstrate that dialects exploit natural
coarticulatory effects to varying degrees.

The theoretical foundation of the dissertation draws on research in variationist

sociolinguistics. There is also some reference to second language acquisition studies,

 

' The concept of the speech community is discussed further in Section 2.5.

although insight from that research is only relied upon to explain evidence of substrate

features from Spanish that appear to be persisting in the native Speaker dialect of English.

1.2 Sociophonetics as Applied to Ethnic Minority Dialects

Variationist sociolinguistics examines the relationship of social factors such as age,
gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status to language variation and change. The most
common area of research within variationist sociolinguistics is phonology and phonetics,
but until recently the majority of phonetic analyses were done impressionistically and
relied on the efforts of trained phoneticians to attempt unbiased judgments of recorded
speech. Although this research contributed valuable ﬁndings, several studies, most
notably Kerswill and Wright (1990), have Shown that even the most sophisticated ear is
inherently biased perceptually.

Sociophonetics is a recent subﬁeld of sociolinguistics that uses ﬁne-grained
instrumental measurements of speech sounds, in combination with quantitative statistical
analysis, to discover correlations between phonetic characteristics, such as vowel quality
and duration, and demographic factors. The precise measurement techniques that are
available through instrumental analysis have enabled insight into gradient low-level
phonetic distinctions between individuals and groups that were previously unattainable.
Since evidence shows that pronunciation is the most difﬁcult aspect of a second language
to acquire (Scovel 1995: 170), sociophonetics is also well suited for research on ethnic
minority dialects that are inﬂuenced by more than one language. Little research has been

done, however, on the phonetics and phonology of individuals who, for example, are

monolingual speakers of English but are also members of an ethnic minority group in the
United States that still includes native speakers of a non-English heritage language.

From a purely non-linguistic perspective, this type of research can bring science
to bear on the popular belief in the US. that ethnic dialects are merely imperfect attempts
at more standard regional norms. One of the myths that has been perpetuated about native
Speaker varieties of Mexican American English, often referred to collectively as Chicano
English, is that it is simply a version of English tainted by interference from Spanish.
Research over the last three decades has provided conclusive evidence, however, that
Chicano English is largely independent of Spanish and is often spoken by people who do
not speak Spanish, although some varieties retain elements of Spanish phonology and
phonetics (Metcalf 1974 and 1979, Omstein-Galicia 1984, Fought 2003).2 Current trends
in sociolinguistic research include interest in the means by which these elements of
Spanish become embedded in native speaker varieties of Mexican American English3 .

From a linguistic perspective, research on emerging dialects such as those found
in communities with new immigrant populations is not only descriptive, but affords
valuable insight into the processes by which language changes and the ways in which
language varies — in terms of both perception and production. The ﬁndings from such
studies have implications for theories of dialect transmission (Wolfram 1974, Deser

1991, Henderson 1995, Kerswill and Williams 2000, Chambers 2002, Trudgill 2004) and

 

2 I know of no work that has been done which examines the substrate inﬂuence of
indigenous languages of the Americas on Chicano English.

3 Throughout the rest of this thesis, the term Mexican American English is used instead of
Chicano English for several reasons. First, many of those interviewed are not native
speakers of English, and Mexican American English can refer to any variety of English
Spoken by people of Mexican American heritage. Secondly, judging from comments
made by respondents, the term Mexican American appears to be less politically charged
than the term Chicano.

 

Ian

inc

ThL
eno '
the
Sou
the l
fOC U
1985
Sou:
Mex I
both
reDOI
bent
Silua:

the II

 

language change (Labov 1963; Labov, Yaeger and Steiner 1972, Labov 1994) —
including theories on the relationship between production and perception (Ohala 1981,
Beddor and Hawkins 1990, Plichta 2004) and research on substrate inﬂuence from

heritage languages (Godinez and Maddieson 1985; Purnell, Salmons and Tepeli 2005).

1.3 Mexican American Migration

The Mexican and Mexican American population in the United States has grown
enormously during the last few decades, comprising 7.3 percent of the total population by
the year 2000, according to US. census ﬁgures. Most Mexican Americans live in the
Southwest, with well over half living in either California or Texas, and, not surprisingly,
the majority of studies that have been done on Mexican American dialects of English are
focused on these two states (e.g., Metcalf 1974, Sawyer 1975, Godinez and Maddieson
1985, Santa Ana 1996, Thomas 2001 , Fought 2003). Large metropolitan areas outside the
Southwest such as Chicago and New York also contain well established and expanding
Mexican American communities, however, and Latinos, in general, are now migrating to
both urban and rural areas all over the United States in unprecedented numbers. The
reported Mexican American population in Michigan, for example, grew by 61 percent
between 1990 and 2000. The recent inﬂux of Latinos into new areas creates unique
Situations of language and dialect contact and affords an excellent opportunity to observe

the formation of new dialects.

1.4 Ethnic Minority Dialects in the United States

This section begins with a discussion of previous ﬁndings on the inﬂuence of parents’
speech on ﬁrst language acquisition in situations where the dialect or language spoken by
the parents differs from the local majority group norm. Although most studies Show that
childrens’ pronunciation is not, in general, ultimately affected by the speech of their
parents, a few studies have produced results that appear to contradict this generalization.
If it is the case that children are not affected by their parents’ speech, then the lack of full
assimilation to mainstream norms by native speakers that the results of the present study
Show strongly supports the conclusion that Mexican Americans in Lansing do, in fact,
constitute a speech community, with its own norms of pronunciation and mechanisms by
which the dialect is acquired as a ﬁrst language by children.

Section 1.4.2 discusses a few of the many sociolinguistic studies that have been
done on the speech of African Americans. Research on this topic constitutes most of the
research done on ethnic minority dialects in the US. Although the degree to which any
given study on African American speech applies to other ethnic minority groups varies,
the purely linguistic issues of dialect contact and language change are relevant to both
situations. Section 1.4.3 summarizes ﬁndings from earlier studies on Latin American
varieties of American English that informed the approach taken in the current study and

the conclusions drawn.

1.4.1 First Language Acquisition
On the level of the individual, communicative competence — knowledge of not only the

grammar of a language variety but also its communicative use, including attitudes and

beliefs about its usage — was ﬁrst noted as distinct from linguistic competence by Dell
Hymes (1974), and its acquisition is an integral part of ﬁrst language acquisition. In the
case of children of immigrants who are not native speakers of the local language, for
example, a phenomenon labeled the “Ethan Experience” by Chambers (2002) is quite
common. Children seem to have auditory “blinders” which help them to acquire the
accent of their peers instead of their parents. The most amazing aspect of this
phenomenon is that it appears to involve some kind of “accent-ﬁlter” which prevents
young children from even hearing the differences between local speech and their parents’
speech. Ethan reported not realizing that his parents spoke differently until, as Chambers
puts it, he was “well into his school years.” This has also been attested in the usually
more subtle situation of dialect contact (Hazen 2002), although further research is needed
in this area.

Other studies have concluded that children are inﬂuenced by their parents”
accents. Deser (1991), using data from recordings done of African Americans in Detroit
by Shuy, Wolfram and Riley in 1965, investigated the speech of pre-adolescents,
adolescents and adults from six families. She found that in families where one parent was
a native of Detroit and one was from the South and still had distinctively Southern speech
characteristics, the children retained some of these characteristics at least into
adolescence. Predictably, pre-adolescent children were more affected by their parents’
speech than adolescent children. In contrast, even as a small child, Ethan exhibited none
of his parents’ non-native features in his dialect.

Degree of contact with the local mainstream norm and the size of the individual’s

native speech community are also signiﬁcant factors and may explain the difference in

 

I'C

ﬁr

drz

dif

Ofa

 

Han
r6515:

in ft!

 

these ﬁndings. Ethan was not a part of an ethnic minority speech community; he was
submerged in the local Anglo speech community, and his peers spoke the local dialect.
The Detroit speakers, however, were more segregated from local Anglo speech, so
contact with the local variety may have come primarily through their parents.
Respondents for the current study were in a different situation because they were both
part of an ethnic speech community — like the respondents in Deser’s study, but unlike
Ethan — and in frequent interaction with Anglos — like Ethan, but unlike the
respondents in Deser’s study. Findings from the current study were similar to Deser’s
ﬁndings, however, in that the teenagers and young adults interviewed do not differ
drastically from their parents in their pronunciation of the vowels tested, but they do
differ from local Anglos. The importance of the speech community for the maintenance

of an ethnic minority dialect is apparent in all three studies.

1.4.2 African American English

For reasons that reﬂect the political and cultural history of the United States, together
with the social milieu of the 1960’s — the early days of the ﬁeld of sociolinguistics ——
the bulk of the research on ethnic minority dialects of English in the US. has focused on
African American English (AAE). Above the level of the individual, there is evidence of
resistance to local majority group norms of English at the level of the speech community
by speakers of AAE, in particular (Labov 1966, Labov and Harris 1986, Myhill and
Harris 1986, Henderson 1995). Although social segregation may explain much of this,
resistance to assimilation has also been found in situations where African Americans are

in frequent contact with Anglos. Henderson (1995), for example, found a lack of

accommodation to what is known as Philadelphia short a by local, middle class African
Americans under 40 who lived in predominantly Anglo neighborhoods and at least
superﬁcially appeared to be fully integrated into mainstream life.

There is also evidence of the spread of speciﬁc AAE features from one region to
another, nationally, that results in further divergence of AAE from mainstream norms.
Bailey and Maynor (1987), for instance, found spreading of a usage of copula be that
appears to be unique in English to African American varieties.

Other studies on AAE have found accommodation to local norms, however.
Denning (1989) found the pronunciation of word-ﬁnal /i/ (e.g., happy) to be similar in
young African Americans in East Palo Alto to the pronunciation found among Anglos
there. Edwards (1992) found that younger speakers of AAE in Detroit who had more
contact with Anglos than others showed fewer AAE features in their speech. And Jones
(2003) found accommodation by African Americans in Lansing, Michigan, to the
pronunciation of /ae/. The comprehensive linguistic reality clearly lies in the fact that, as
pointed out by Denning (1989), accommodation and resistance (or divergence) are not
necessarily mutually exclusive. He writes, “Distinct varieties in contact may, for complex
sociological and linguistic reasons, be expected more realistically to appear to diverge

and converge simultaneously” (145).

1.4.3 Mexican American English
Although many signiﬁcant ﬁndings have come out of the research on AAE, it is not clear
how much of the history of AAE is applicable to other ethnic minority dialects of

English. Every ethnic minority group that emerges to stake a claim in the development of

 

"9

or

S}

Ne

301

Am

WOT

 

 

American society brings a unique social, linguistic, and political mix to bear on the
varieties of English that emerge within that group and how they are viewed by others.
Within the group of people that are labeled Hispanic by the US. census, for instance,
there is as vast an array of backgrounds as in any other group who share only a common
heritage language. Very little is known overall about the process of language change in
ethnic minority communities.

Several studies have been done on the inﬂuence of AAE and local Anglo varieties
on the speech of Puerto Ricans in the eastern United States. Wolfram (1974) found both
syntactic and phonological AAE features in the speech of young male Puerto Ricans in
New York City. Poplack (1978) found some accommodation and some resistance by
young Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia to local dialect features of both Anglo and African
American speech. Interestingly, girls were more inﬂuenced by Anglo speech and boys
were more inﬂuenced by AAE, which she attributes to both level of contact and identity.
With respect to identity, Poplack’s ﬁndings are similar to those of Fought (1999), who
found the distribution of California Anglo /u/-fronting4 among Mexican American
teenagers and young adults in Los Angeles to be strongly correlated with the interacting
factors of social class, gang membership and gender such that middle-class non-gang
afﬁliated women were the most likely to have acquired this feature. Lower class gang
afﬁliated men were the least likely to have a fronted pronunciation of /u/, and men, in

general, did not front /u/ as much as the women. Both Poplack and Fought link non-

 

4 Fought does not list speciﬁc words in her discussion of /u/-fronting, instead stating that
tokens were taken from “passages of speech that occurred well into the interview,
preferably during narrative passages, in order to access the most vernacular speech style”
(11). High F2 values for realizations of /u/ were ﬁrst documented in young Anglo
Californians by Hinton et a1. (1987).

10

 

Clet-c
{011m

eXanI

 

Anglo speech features to a desire to express toughness on the part of the men. Fought
comments that the pressure on men to appear tough is especially strong in Latino society
(1999: 20). The correlation between non-Anglo speech and a perception of toughness in
the speech of young people, in particular, is a quite plausible corollary to Trudgill’s
(1986) principle of covert prestige — that non-standard features may carry a type of
prestige that is in opposition to mainstream standards, most commonly as a marker of
toughness in male Speech. It is not clear, however, the degree to which the teenage
speakers in these studies represent the dialect found among adults in the ethnic minority
speech communities of which they are members. It is possible that a high frequency of
non-standard features is, at least partially, the result of age-speciﬁc behavior. The current
study uses a wider lens, in an attempt to make general comparisons between one ethnic
minority speech community and the surrounding mainstream speech norms.

Most analyses of Mexican American varieties of English have been
impressionistic, including the three done on Mexican Americans in the Midwestern
United States (Hartford 1975 and 1978, Frazer 1996, and Gordon 2000). Hartford (1978)
examined the phonology of thirty Mexican American adolescents who lived in a
predominantly African American area of Gary, Indiana. She did not talk speciﬁcally
about accommodation to local norms, but her main conclusion was that the young
Mexican American women used prestige variants more than the young men.

Based on his analysis of oral history interviews recorded in 1986 and 1987 of
eleven Mexican American speakers in Rock Falls and Sterling, Illinois, Frazer (1996)
found no evidence of a distinctive Mexican American dialect in that area. Gordon (2000)

examines the inﬂuence of the Northern Cities Shift on African American and Mexican

11

American speakers in the Calumet area of northwest Indiana. These speakers do not
appear to be participating in the NCS, although this result does not indicate resistance to
local norms since the white speakers he interviewed are only very minimally participating
in the shift themselves, and he surrnises that the NCS is, in fact, “embryonic” in the
region (121).

A small number of instrumental studies, all done outside the Midwest, have
compared features of a regional standard dialect to the Mexican American English of that
region (Godinez and Maddieson 1985; Fought 1999; Thomas 2000 and 2001; Wolfram,
Carter and Moriello 2004). As with studies on AAE, some found accommodation to local
Anglo norms, and some found resistance to accommodation. With respect to /u/-fronting,
for example, Godinez and Maddieson (1985) found that 16 and 17-year-old Mexican
American boys in East Los Angeles had not acquired fronted /u/. Fought (1999),
however, in the study mentioned above, found that /u/-fronting was governed by a
complex set of conditioning factors in the Los Angeles speakers she interviewed. In
contrast to the ﬁndings of Godinez and Maddieson, some of the 15 to 32-year-old male
respondents had accommodated to this feature — those who were both middle class and
non-gang afﬁliated — although they were not fronted as much as some of the women.

Wolfram, Carter and Moriello (2004) report on accommodation to Southern /ai/
monophthongization—one of the most salient features of Southern Anglo speech—by
Hispanics (mostly Mexican American) in two small cities in North Carolina. They did not
ﬁnd a high degree of accommodation to this feature by members of either group studied,
but they state that this may be partially explained by the insularity of the Hispanic

communities being examined and the low level of interaction between those they

12

interviewed and Anglos. In addition, because the study was focused on early signs of
dialect emergence, the participants were all recent arrivals to North Carolina and spoke
English only as a second language.

Thomas ﬁnds both phonetic and phonological variation between Mexican
American varieties of English in Texas and Anglo varieties. For example, in Thomas
(2000) his results Show that the glide /ai/ follows the same rules of phonological
conditioning in Mexican Americans in Laredo, Texas, and in Anglos in central Ohio,
although there is some variation in production. Thomas (2001) brieﬂy compares vowel
features of Mexican American English in Texas to Anglo varieties of English, African
American English and non-Texas varieties of Mexican American English. Most notable
among these features, with regard to the present study, is his ﬁnding that /m/ is not raised
before nasals (e.g., hand) in the speech of Mexican Americans in Texas. He also shows
charts for several middle class speakers who have partially accommodated to local Anglo
speech.

Southern California and southern Texas, where almost all of the studies of Mexican
American English have been conducted, have densely concentrated Mexican American
populations where Spanish is still the ﬁrst language for many speakers. The situation
elsewhere is starkly different, both in terms of the Mexican American communities and
the local Anglo varieties. Research in areas outside the Southwest will provide further
information on which features, if any, are common across all varieties of Mexican
American English, in what ways the regional varieties differ, and if there is any pattern in
terms of the degree to which speakers in Mexican American speech communities

assimilate to mainstream features. Potentially, such information could also shed more

13

light on AAE, other ethnic varieties of English, and general principles of change due to

dialect contact.

1.5 Overview of the Dissertation
This dissertation attempts to provide insight into the dialect found among Mexican

American Speakers of English in Lansing, Michigan, with respect to four of the six

vowels involved in the NCS—k, e, a, o/. Chapter 1 has introduced the theoretical and

empirical background for the project, illustrating the need for and usefulness of the
present study. Chapter 2 presents the methodology, setting and participants, in addition to
providing historical information about possible linguistic inﬂuences on the speech of

Mexican Americans in Michigan. Chapter 3 presents the overall, normalized results

across social categories for the vowels /m, e, a, 0/. Chapter 4 presents ﬁndings on the

coarticulatory effects of consonantal environment on the pronunciation of /a:/ in the

Speech of those respondents who are both lifelong residents of Lansing and native
speakers of English. Finally, Chapter 5 is a summary of the study, with discussion of

areas for future research.

14

CHAPTER 2: Methodology

2.1 Physical and Linguistic Setting

Data collection for this project was conducted in Lansing, the capital of Michigan,
located in the south central part of the state — about 90 miles from the larger cities of
Grand Rapids and Detroit, and only several hours from Chicago. Although the Lansing
population was only 120,000 in the year 20005, several major highways run through the
city, and many of its residents are from Detroit or Chicago, giving it an urban quality
which is apparent in the speech patterns found there, as discussed below.

Michigan falls in the center of the dialect area deﬁned by the Phonological Atlas
of North America as the Inland North. The most distinctive regional speech feature that
has been discovered in this area is the sound change in progress known as the Northern
Cities Shift (NCS). This shift, illustrated schematically in Figure 2.1, is a vowel change
that affects six vowels and has been under way among Anglos in urban areas across the
north-central United States for 35 years or more. Labov (2001: 7) observes that all of the
cities in which the NCS has been found were settled through westward migration from
New York State, explaining the ubiquitousness of the dialect across such a huge and
densely populated area as the Inland North. It has been found to follow the cascade
model of expansion, spreading outward from the urban areas where it begins to
progressively smaller cities and towns (Labov 2001: 436). Evans et al (2000) found the
NCS to be well advanced among younger Anglos in Lansing, as would be expected given
its status as a capital city and its proximity to several large urban centers. The current

study investigates the degree to which Mexican Americans in Lansing are participating in

 

5 US. Census 2000 ﬁgure

15

the shift in four of the six NCS vowels as a measure of their accommodation to

predominant local norms.

Figure 2.1: The Northern Cities Shiﬁ (NCS)6
(based on Labov 1994: 191)

 

{ . F2

bit [r]

n \

head [8]

cut [A]
1 \ \ caught [0]

 

bag [at]
< hot [0]

 

The NCS has been characterized as a chain shift, in which the vowels involved are
rotating phonetically, in the acoustic space, in a domino-effect pattern that enables the
maintenance of perceptual distinctness. This characterization rests on the assumption that

the vowels in question began in one position, historically, and are now pronounced

 

6 In sociophonetic descriptions of both the Northern Cities Shiﬁ and the Southern Shift,
vowels are oﬁen referred to in terms of their ﬁrst and second formant values, and it has
become stande in the literature to refer to vowels involved in these shifts as “moving”
when the F1 and F2 are different than the assumed earlier position. This practice will be
followed here.

7 No phonemic re-classiﬁcation of words due to the shift has yet been documented.
Evidence of such reclassiﬁcation could come, for example, from answers to questions
about which words rhyme with each other (e.g., “Does can rhyme with den or with
man?”) ‘

l6

differently. Although studies have shown that older people are less “shifted” than
younger people (Labov, Yaeger and Steiner 1972), and rural speakers are less shifted
than urban speakers (Callary 1975, Ito 1999), the actual positions of these vowels before
the NCS is not completely known.

Some insight into the past comes from the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central
States (LANCS) ﬁles, a collection of ﬁeld notes and hand-written impressionistic
transcriptions based on interviews, mostly done in 1948, with roughly 500 informants
across the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and
southwestern Ontario. Lansing is located in Ingham County, and while no Ingham
County respondents were interviewed, three were interviewed in adjacent Eaton County,
two by Raven McDavid and one by Harold Allen — both founding fathers of American
dialectology. Of the three respondents, two were 73-year-old men — a carpenter and a
farmer — and the third was a woman — described as a housewife — whose age was not
noted. The elderly farmer did not show any raising of /a3/, the closest to raising being
that in his speech — as well as in the speech of some other respondents from nearby
counties — /a:/ was sometimes transcribed with a rising off-glide before velars, as in

[bx'g] ‘bag’ and [saelk] ‘sack’. The carpenter’s /&/, however, was sometimes transcribed

with a [A] mark that indicates raising, as in [paiAstja] ‘pasture’ or even [saAeks] ‘sacks’,

with an [8] following a raised [a]. Interestingly, this speaker’s mother was born in

Buffalo, New York — where evidence of strongly raised /ae/ was documented by Labov,
Yaeger and Steiner (1972), and she may have been part of the migration that brought the
early NCS west into Michigan. The pronunciations of the third Eaton County respondent

—— the housewife — and those of the LANCS respondents from Wayne County, where

17

Detroit is located, were also Often marked as having a raised pronunciation of /a=:/. The
former result ﬁts the hypothesis that women are the leaders of change, and the latter

ﬁnding is expected given the characterization of the NCS as beginning in urban areas. In

the words listed, there was no evidence of NCS-like pronunciation of either /8/ or /o/”.

Unfortunately, there were too few legible tokens Of words containing /a/ to draw any

useful conclusions about that vowel. Except for this lack of evidence on the

pronunciation of /o/, the LANCS data otherwise supports Labov’s hypothesis that [re]

was the ﬁrst vowel to shift (1994: 195), and they also indicate that the NCS is occurring
relatively quickly and began fairly recently.

Labov (1994: 195) hypothesized that, based on evidence from previous ﬁndings,
the NC S proceeded chronologically according to the following order:

1. Raising of /m/
2. Fronting of /<1/

3. Centralization and fronting of /o/
4. Lowering of /I/ and /e/

5. Backing Of/e/

6. Backing of /A/

In the ﬁrst step, /m/ was realized in a high front position, nearing [I] in its most

extreme form, a position referred to as fronted and raised in the vowel space because the

F2 is higher than older attested positions for this vowel and the F1 is lower. In the second

step, /(1/ started sounding more like [re] and was pronounced with a progressively higher

F2. In the third stage, the back vowel /3/ was pronounced as [a] and referred to as

 

8 Except before /g/, as in hog and dog.

18

lowered and fronted. In a later change, /e/, the fourth vowel that will be discussed in this

thesis, was pronounced further back in some shifted Speakers and lower in others. The
hypothesis is that, not only did the changes proceed in this order during the initial
development of the NCS; they have continued to diffuse in this order, as well, with the
oldest changes jumping ﬁrst to a new region. It is important to note, however, that the
order in which NCS features are adopted through geographical diffusion may not match
the order in which such features are adopted by speakers who are members of a group
that relocated from an unshiﬁed area to an area that was already somewhat shifted, as is
the case with the respondents in this study.

There is also controversy over whether the NCS is a chain ‘shift’ as opposed to a
more random re-positioning of certain individual vowels. As pointed out by Gordon
(2001: 13), “Our knowledge of the NCS is based on rather restricted sets of data
produced by a handful of researchers.” Although his own data are impressionistic,
Gordon (2001 :16) presents evidence that the NCS vowels have a much more complicated
distribution than originally thought. The most difficult aspect of a chain Shiﬁ to explain is
the ﬁrst step — the change that began the chain reaction. Motivation for the ﬁrst step of
the NCS, the fronting and raising of /ae/, stems from Ohala’s (1981) theory of hearer-
motivated sound change. Although Ohala viewed change based on perception as the
result of misperception, change based on perception may instead be linked to the
difference between the acoustics of perception and the acoustics of production. Several
phonetic studies (Wright 1986, Beddor and Hawkins 1990, Kingston 1991, Plichta 2004)
have shown that -— although the perception of vowel height is dependent on more than

just F1 and the nasal formant — nasalization appears to have a centralizing effect on

19

perception, such that nasalized low vowels are perceived as higher and nasalized high
vowels are perceived as lower. Since low vowels are more likely to nasalize than high
vowels (Plichta 2004), it may be the case that /ae/ nasalized ﬁrst, in only some phonetic
environments, but was perceived instead as raised, and began the NCS.

The listener-motivated theory of sound change, the LANCS data, and studies that
Show raised /a/ appearing ﬁrst in marginal areas affected by the NCS (Ito 1999, Evans
2001) all support the hypothesis that /a3/ moved ﬁrst historically (and geographically) and
the other changes followed. Additionally, as discussed below, Eckert (1988) documented
two changes that were not recorded in earlier studies. For these reasons, and because the
changes in pronunciation that occur ultimately result in the maintenance of perceptual
distinction between phones, this dissertation adopts the hypothesis that these changes can
be described as a chain shift.

Much of the research on the NCS has been conducted in Detroit, making
Michigan a good location for continued studies on ongoing change in the shift and the
effects of the shift on non-Anglo populations. Several early papers on the shift took their
data from recordings made in 1965 by Shuy, Wolfram and Riley of over 700 Detroit
speakers. Twenty-four of these speakers were analyzed impressionistically by Fasold in
the late 1960’s, and Labov, Yaeger and Steiner analyzed some of the Detroit data
instrumentally, using a spectrograph, as a part of their 1972 report on sound change in
progress. Based on these 1965 Detroit interviews and other interviews conducted from
1969 to 1970 in the northern cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Cleveland and
Chicago as part of the Labov, Yaeger and Steiner study, all but two of the features

labeled now as NCS characteristics were ﬁrst documented. Labov (1994: 178) credits

20

Ralph Fasold with ﬁrst recognizing raised /$/, fronted /o/ and fronted /:>/ in an

unpublished paper written in 1969. Labov, Yaeger and Steiner (1972) reﬁned NCS /a:/ to

fronted and raised, and added low /I/ and low /8/ to the list of NCS characteristics. Based

on results from research She conducted only a few years later, during the 1970’s, in a high

school in the Detroit suburbs, Eckert (1988 and elsewhere) completed the list by adding

backed /e/ and backed and lowered /A./ to the NC S inventory. Callary (1975), in a study

on the relative position of /ae/ in the vowel systems of eighteen young Illinois women,
was the ﬁrst to discover that the NCS spreads to progressively smaller cities and towns
instead of spreading outward in concentric circles, like a wave.

Studies since then have conﬁrmed the earlier results and traced the path of the
shift into new regions and non-Anglo populations. Several recent studies have revisited
Anglos in urban areas (Hemdobler 1993; Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005), while other
NCS studies have moved away from this group to focus on Anglos and others in rural
areas (Gordon 1997 and 2000, Ito 1999), minority groups in urban areas (Knack 1991,
Evans 2001, Jones 2003), and attitudes about language variation (Preston 1996). Not all

of the vowels involved in the NCS have been equally well documented, however. The

range of instability and direction of change of /I/ and /A/, in particular — two of the three

vowels described as undergoing "new and vigorous changes" by Labov (1994: 195) —

are not well understood. For this reason, only the vowels he, 8, a, o/ are discussed here.

21

2.2 Mexican Americans in Lansing

Migrants of Mexican heritage began settling in the Lansing area in substantial numbers
during WWII, when workers were needed in the factories, and the population has been
steadily growing since then — unlike the Anglo population which, incidentally, is
decreasing in number. For the present study, the longest anyone interviewed had lived in
Lansing was 68 years, and this man indicated that the ﬁve “ﬁrst” settled families all knew
each other well. A majority of Lansing’s Mexican American families are originally from
south Texas and still maintain strong ties to Texas.

A strong sense of solidarity is apparent in this close-knit community, but Mexican
Americans are also well integrated throughout the Lansing area now, and many families
have been in Michigan for one, two or even three generations. Although no ofﬁcial
numbers are available on how many migrant workers come to Michigan each summer,
the pastor at Cristo Rey Church, a centralizing institution for the Latino community in
Lansing, estimated that between four and ﬁve thousand undocumented migrants continue
to come to Lansing each summer. Many thousands more than this migrate to the
agricultural regions in western, southwestern and north central Michigan every year. The
group mobility and the constant inﬂux of people help to keep both Texas English and
Spanish alive — although many second and third generation residents are monolingual.

AS reported in the 2000 US. Census, the documented Hispanic9 population in
Lansing approaches the national average of 12.5%. Hispanics made up 10% of Lansing‘s
total population in the year 2000, with Mexican Americans comprising the majority of

this group, at 6.8% of Lansing’s total population —— roughly 8,000 people.

 

9 The term Hispanic is used here in accordance with US. Census terminology.

22

2.3 Participants

Out of a total of forty-seven interviews, data from thirty-two respondents are included in
the analysis presented here. Table 1 shows each participant’s pseudonym, sex, age, age
group (for the statistical analysis), generation of residency in Michigan, bilingualism, age
of arrival to Michigan if the speaker is ﬁrst generation, whether he or she is from Texas,

and socioeconomic status.

23

Table 2.1: List of Participants

Age Gen. ‘0 Speaks AOA in From
Age Group in MI Spanish MIll TX'2

Cl)
C:

Pseudonym Sex SE
Andy M 14 1 2 no no W
Ronald B M 16 l 2 no yes M
Isaiah M 27 2 1 yes 14 no W
Rodolfo M 27 2 2 yes yes W
Rene M 27 2 1 yes 10 yes M
Jesse M 28 2 3 no yes W
Melito M 29 2 3 no yes W
Jose M 35 2 2 no yes M
Ralph M 41 2 2 no yes M
Laurence M 41 2 1 yes 4 yes W
Rafael M 43 2 2 no yes W
Edmund M 45 3 2 no yes M
Martin M 47 3 2 yes 1 yes M
Jack M 49 3 2 yes yes M
Gilberto M 54 3 1 yes 24 yes M
Terence M 56 3 1 yes 22 yes M
Walter M 71 3 2 yes 3 yes W
Lucy B F 14 1 2 no yes M
Melinda H F 16 l 3 no yes M
Estela F 17 1 3 no yes W
Lola F 19 1 1 yes 10 no W
Emelia F 20 l 2 yes yes W
Judith F 21 1 2 yes yes W
Solana T F 22 1 3 no yes M
Ana F 28 2 3 no yes M
Sabina H F 35 2 2 yes yes M
Cynthia F 39 2 1 yes 21 yes M
Loretta B F 40 2 1 yes 10 yes M
Melissa F 42 2 1 yes 10 yes W
Mabel F 45 3 2 yes no M
Madeleine F 47 3 1 yes 12 no M
Simona H F 59 3 1 yes 24 yes M

 

'0 Gen. in M1 = Generation in Michigan. Generation 1 = not born in Michigan;
Generation 2 = born in Lansing, or moved there by the age of 3, but parents not born in
Michigan; Generation 3 = born in Lansing, and one parent born in south central Michigan
H AOA in MI = Age of arrival in Michigan

12 From TX = the speaker’s family is originally from Texas. The speaker himself/herself
may be native to Lansing.

'3 SES = Socioeconomic status (see Appendix B for method used to calculate status).

M = middle class; W = working class

24

 

 

an:

I\\'(

2.3.1 Demographic Constants

Participants had to fulﬁll two criteria. First, the respondent’s parents were both required
to be of Mexican descent. Secondly, participants needed to be ﬂuent speakers of English.
Nineteen of the thirty-two were self-reported native speakers of English. Ten stated that
they began speaking English at the start of primary school or earlier. The three remaining
participants began speaking English at the ages of 9, 10, and 14, when their families
moved to Michigan. The speaker who began learning English at the age of 14 was
included for two reasons. The placement of his vowels was not signiﬁcantly different
from that of the native speakers interviewed, possibly because he learned English in
Michigan and so acquired the local dialect. Furthermore, second language acquisition
studies on Italian bilinguals in Canada have found that, until the age of 14, near native
acquisition of second language phonology is still possible (Flege, MacKay and Meador
1999; Flege, Schirru and MacKay 2003).

The ﬁfteen participants whose data were not used were eliminated from the
analysis for the following reasons: two had colds that affected their speech production;
two had lived in Michigan for only two years; two had one parent who was not of
Mexican descent”; one grew up with a white family; one had trouble reading the
wordlist; two older men and two women in their eighties were interviewed for oral
history purposes and did not wear a microphone much of the time; and in three cases, the

recording quality was inadequate for the purposes of instrumental measurement.

 

'4 The Polish population is also large in southern Michigan, and these two speakers are
from one of several Polish Mexican families I met while doing research for the project.

25

2.3.2 Independent Social Variables
Initially, the three primary social variables under investigation were sex, socioeconomic
status and whether the respondent was born in Lansing or not. Table 2.2 provides the cell

distribution across these variables.

Table 2.2: Cell distribution across sex, socioeconomic status and birthplace

 

 

 

 

Middle Class Working Class Middle Class Working Class
Women Women Men Men
Generation 1 4 2 3 2
Lansing
nativeIS 6 3 6 6

 

 

 

 

 

Speakers were split into two groups based on birthplace, such that ﬁrst generation
residents were compared to Lansing natives. First generation speakers from Texas or
Mexico were required to have lived in Lansing for at least half their lives. Most had lived
there well over that, although two younger speakers who fell just short of this mark were
also included in the ﬁnal analysis — a 27-year-Old who moved to Lansing at 14, and a 19-
year-Old who moved to Lansing at 10 years of age. Participants who moved to Lansing by
the age of 3 were considered Lansing natives and categorized as second generation.
Although none of the participants had parents who were both born in Lansing, six
speakers had one parent who was born in Michigan and had lived in Michigan all of his

or her life. None of the speakers who were native to Lansing had lived outside of the

 

15 This category includes one man who moved to Lansing by the age of 3 and one man
who had only lived in Lansing for 10 years at the time of the interview but was native to
urban south central Michigan.

26

 

Lansing area for more than two years, except for one 35-year-old man, Jose, who had
only lived in Lansing for 10 years but was native to urban south central Michigan.

Speakers were also placed into one of two socioeconomic status categories —
working class or middle class. Categorization was accomplished by assigning each
respondent an index score based on the formula provided by the Warner Index of Social
Characteristics (1960), which takes into account occupation, housing, neighborhood, and
level of education (Appendix B). Index score was inversely related to status, such that an
index score of 17-50 was assigned the rank Middle Class, and an index score of 51-70
was assigned the rank Working Class. Respondents who were still in high school were
assigned the rank of their parents.

Seven Speakers scored in the Middle or Upper Middle Class range and only two
speakers scored above 55 (Working Class). Over two thirds of the speakers fell near the
Lower Middle/Upper Working Class boundary, however. This distribution is
representative of the overall socioeconomic situation of Mexican Americans Lansing.
Many adults work at good factory, retail or middle management jobs, have attended
several years of community college, and own modest houses. Possibly due to this lack of
Sharp stratiﬁcation between social classes, socioeconomic status was not correlated with
any signiﬁcant differences in vowel production.

Lansing’s settled Mexican American community is also upwardly mobile,
however. All ﬁve of the Speakers under 18 who were interviewed planned to get a 4-year
college degree; eight of the twenty-seven respondents over age 18 had received a
bachelor’s degree, and three of these had master’s degrees. It remains to be seen whether

an increase in the average level of education among members of this speech community

27

has lasting effects on the dialect due to the resulting greater mobility of some of its
speakers.

Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests were also performed across age group and
sex categories. Interestingly, three distinct age groups emerged from the data (14-24, 25-
44, 45-71), although this unfortunately resulted in an uneven cell distribution. Table 2.3

provides the cell distribution across age and sex.

Table 2.3: Cell distribution across age and sex

 

 

Men Men Men Women Women Women
14-24 25-44 45-71 l4-22 25-44 45-71
2 9 6 7 5 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dialect background was also taken into account — where each individual learned English
and whether or not he/she learned English as a native language. The linguistic situation of
many Mexican Americans in Lansing is quite complex and is discussed in greater detail

in Chapter 3.

2.4 Field Work and Data Handling and Processing

The majority of the respondents for this study were recruited through contacts made
while the author was working as a volunteer in the after-school program for children at
Cristo Rey Community Center from September 2003 to June 2004, and then again from
January to June 2005. Contacts were also made through going to Cristo Rey Church,

visiting restaurants and grocery stores, talking with neighbors, and general word of

28

 

mouth. The primary interview locations were Cristo Rey Community Center,
respondents’ homes, and respondents’ places of employment.

The data presented here are based on recordings of each Speaker reading a
wordlist (Appendix A) as part of a longer session that included the reading of a short
passage, a dialect perception test, and a conversational question-based sociolinguistic

interview (Appendix C) that lasted anywhere from 15-60 minutes (mostly dependent on

the respondent’s willingness to talk). Over 1,500 tokens of the four vowels /a, e, a, 3/

were measured, in various phonetic environments. Over 2,500 tokens were measured in
all, from the wordlist alone.

The Northern Cities Shift has been shown to be a change from below the
conscious level, meaning that people are not aware of it in their own speech, and they do
not tend to notice it in the speech of others locally. This suggests that the NCS is not a
characteristic that speakers actively attempt to remove from their speech, even when
doing a very careful task, such as reading a wordlist. The degree to which it is present in
a person’s speech is likely, therefore, to be constant across speech styles (Ash 1999).
Furthermore, the analysis of wordlist data leads to conservative results since, if a feature
such as the NCS is present in the speech of someone who is being quite careful — for
example, when reading a wordlist in an interview situation — then it is likely be present
in more casual speech.

All interviews were conducted entirely in English. Analog recordings were made
using a Marantz PMD201 portable cassette recorder for some speakers, a Marantz
PMD222 for the rest, and an AT83 lb Audio-technica uni-directional clip-on microphone.

The recordings were then digitized (16 bit samples, 10 kHz sample rate) using the

29

acoustic analysis software Praat. First and second formant measurements were taken
through Praat, using the sociophonetic software program Akustyk. When possible, the
vowel was measured during the steady state. For diphthongs, a single measurement was
taken just after the perceptual end of the transition from the preceding consonant. The
data used in the calculation of overall averages for groups of individuals, as presented in
Chapter 3, were normalized using a Nearey normalization algorithm (without F3) to
produce regularized measurements, whereas the phonetic conditioning results discussed
in Chapter 4 are based on raw data. In this latter part of the project, analysis for each
individual was performed separately on the 31 words from the wordlist that contain /ae/

as the stressed vowel.

2.5 Linguistic Influences

Although the speech community has been a fundamental unit of analysis in
sociolinguistics since the mid-1960’s, or earlier, deﬁning what a speech community is has
proven tricky. Labov, interested in generalizations across monolingual speakers, deﬁnes
it as a group of speakers with shared norms for the production and the evaluation of
speech (Labov 1972: 120-121). In his 2001 survey of Philadelphia speech, he concedes
that his approach fails to take into account issues such as language and dialect contact,
but states that he is interested in “those changes that occur from within a linguistic
system” (Labov 2001: 20), and hence his deﬁnition of speech community is appropriate
to this goal. Gumperz and Levinson (1996) give a broader deﬁnition and emphasize the
signiﬁcance of “networks of interacting individuals” to socialization, both linguistic and

cultural (Patrick 2002: 581). This more expansive deﬁnition is perhaps too general, but it

30

does potentially accommodate Speakers who are members of the same community but do
not share the same set of norms, such as non-ethnic speakers in an ethnic community.
Santa Ana (1993) formalizes the idea of networks that extend beyond a Single group of
speakers with shared norms by proposing the language setting, “a model of the contact
between a number of dialects and languages in a social setting for a given population.”
This model takes into account the linguistic complexity that is found in most ethnic
communities in the United States and elsewhere. He writes, “In the case of the Chicanos,
the language setting should include monolingual Spanish and English as well as bilingual
speakers, and the non-Chicanos with whom Chicanos come into contact” (Santa Ana
1993: 4). This is the linguistic context in which Lansing’s Mexican Americans ﬁnd
themselves, and so the language setting, because it has broader scope than the more
traditional speech community, is a useful framework for explaining linguistic inﬂuences
on the speech of members of this group.

Given this context, there are at least four language varieties that need to be taken
into account when discussing the Speech of Mexican Americans in Lansing, Michigan:
Northern Cities Shifted speech; the Older local norm that was representative of Lansing
speech during the 1940’s; Texas Mexican American English, or Tejano English; and,

ﬁnally, Spanish, the heritage language. This section addresses these four varieties.

31

2.5.1 Northern Cities Shifted English
Northern Cities Shifted speech is a constant inﬂuence on the dialect of this group. Figure
2.2 shows the vowel Space of a group of young, female Detroit Speakers, born between

1970 and 1976.

Figure 2.2: Normalized means for female Detroit area speakers, ages 19-25, interviewed

in 1995 (data from Preston, personal communication)

 

 

 

 

300
u
525- I
'c
I o
E
c 7504
.. A
LL 3: 8
e
975« /
.0,
1200 - , .
3150 2537.5 I925 1312.5 700

F2 (H2)

The averages presented are normalized, using the same algorithm used for the data

presented in Chapter 3 below. The use of normalized means allows for the comparison of

32

individuals who vary with respect to overall acoustic range and is also an estimation of
the process of regularization performed by the human brain during speech perception.
Speech would be incomprehensible without some internal procedure for regularizing and
relativizing input. Normalized data is especially useful when comparing men and women,
who differ dramatically in both formant range and pitch range, on average, but is also
effective in the comparison of sarne-sex individuals. Although a normalization procedure
that is completely accurate in its elimination of all and only the physiological differences
between speakers has not yet been found, normalization does allow for comparison
between studies, especially those that use the same normalization algorithm. The Nearey
formula used in this study is the same as that used in the speech software program
Plotnik, created and developed by William Labov, which is popular in sociolinguistics.
Although the young women whose vowel means are presented in Figure 2.2 are
from the Detroit area rather than Lansing, their speech represents an advanced stage of
the Northern Cities Shifted dialect that has been found throughout Lower Michigan,
including Lansing (Evans et al. 2000). Therefore, the normalized vowel measurements
for the female respondents in the present study are compared against the normalized
results seen here as a measure of the degree to which Mexican American women in

Lansing have accommodated to the NCS.

2.5.2 Older Rural Michigan Speech
The Speech of Anglos in Lansing during the 1940’s, when the current Mexican American
speech community in Lansing was beginning to form, must also be considered. Evidence

from analyses of recordings made during the 1960’s for the Dictionary of American

33

Regional English (DARE) project suggests that at least some features of the NCS have
been around for well over 50 years. Figure 2.3 shows the vowel chart of a middle-aged

man from rural Lower Michigan who was born in 1920.

Figure 2.3: Vowel chart of a 50-year-old Anglo man from Gaylord, MI, interviewed in

1970 (data from DARE ﬁles, chart modiﬁed from Ito 1999: 55)]6

200

 

'3
2'1 :

F1 ("2)
§

800‘

 

 

10m . . ,
3150 2537.5 1925 1312.5 700

F2 (HZ)

 

 

'6 Normalized data is not used in Figures 2.3 - 2.5 because the vowels of only one
individual are shown in each chart. These ﬁgures vary in scale because they are based on
raw formant measurements, but they are still useful for making comparisons between
speakers with respect to relative vowel positions.

34

Older Anglo men from rural communities such as Gaylord tend to be the most
conservative in their speech and the last speakers to show any kind of innovation.

However, this man’s vowel conﬁguration clearly indicates incipient stages of the NCS.

For example, although his /ze/ and /e/ do not ﬁt the pattern of the young Detroit area

women seen in Figure 2.2, in which /$/ and /e/ are at the same height, these two vowels

are much closer on the F 1 axis in his speech than they would be in a completely unshifted
speaker. Figure 2.4 shows the vowel chart of his sister, who was roughly the same age at

the time of the interviews.

35

Figure 2.4: Vowel chart of a middle-aged Anglo woman from Gaylord, MI, interviewed

in 1970'7 (data from DARE ﬁles, chart modiﬁed from Ito 1999: 55)

 

F1 (Hz)
5

 

 

 

 

1000 r . .
3150 2537.5 1925 1312.5 700

F2011)

Her system is even more NCS-like than her brother’s. Her /33/ and /e/ are at the same

height, as in the young Detroit women’s speech. If this degree of shifting was found in

rural Anglo speakers who were born around 1920, then it can reasonably be expected to
have been active already in the Lansing area during the 1940’s, when the Mexican
American community was just beginning to establish roots there. Further indication that

the NCS was in Lansing by the 1940’s comes from Shuy, Wolfram and Riley’s 1965

 

‘7 Ito (1999) reports that although there is no documentation on this speaker, the content
of the interview reveals that she is the sister of the previous speaker and close to the same
age.

36

Detroit recordings, discussed above, which revealed that all stages of the NCS except

backed /e/ and backed and lowered /A/ were strong there by that time. If it is a shift that

advances in stages, the shift had to be well under way in Detroit if four of the six stages
were noticeable by 1965. In addition, the previously mentioned LANCS indicates the

presence of raised /ze/ in the speech of even older Speakers by 1948 in areas close to

Lansing; and Thomas (2001: 76) points out that McDavid (1958) noted fronted /a/ in the

speech Of Older Linguistic Atlas informants from the general NCS region.

2.5.3 Mexican American English in Texas

Twenty-seven respondents for this study came from families that had migrated from
Texas to Michigan, and only ﬁve came from families that had migrated directly from
Mexico to Michigan. Ten respondents moved directly from Texas to Michigan
(Appendix D and Appendix F). A third linguistic inﬂuence, therefore, on the English
spoken by Mexican Americans in Lansing is the Spanish-inﬂuenced English of Mexican
Americans in south Texas — sometimes referred to as Tejano Englishl8 (Bayley 1994
and 1997) — a variety which is kept alive in Lansing by a constant ﬂow of migrants from
south Texas. Thomas (2001) presents the most comprehensive evidence available on the
English of Mexican Americans in Texas. Although actual formant values are not listed

and no averages or normalized data are given, he provides individual vowel charts for

 

'8 Bayley (1997) uses the term Tejano English to refer speciﬁcally to “the variety of
English spoken natively by working-class barrio residents” in San Antonio (209). He
comments that he chose this term in large part because participants did not object to it.
Thomas’ (2001) data suggest that the vowel quality found in such speakers is not unique
to San Antonio. Reference to this term here is intended to put emphasis on those features
of the speech of Mexican Americans from south Texas that may be widespread enough to
have an impact on the English of Mexican Americans in Lansing.

37

seventeen Mexican American speakers of English, sixteen of whom are from Texas and
were recorded between 1988 and 1992. All of these speakers learned English as children,
and the data for each individual is either from a reading passage or from a conversation.
Three respondents are described as “middle-class Mexican Americans from Texas who
have assimilated to some features of Anglo vemaculars” (188), and the other thirteen are
described as representative of “what seems to be the mainstream of Mexican American
English in Texas” (188). The age range of these thirteen is 14 to 68, and the majority are
from southern Texas. Figure 2.5 shows a modiﬁed version of one of these charts — that

of a 31-year-old woman from San Antonio who was born in 1961 and recorded in 1992.

Figure 2.5: Vowel chart of a 31-year-old Mexican American woman from San Antonio,

TX, interviewed in 1992 (modiﬁed from Thomas 2001: 189)

 

 

 

 

I I F
400 . i u u n 4
e
500 .
E O I
600 - -
IL.
700 ~ A t
I
l
800 .- (1 ~
I
* 2C
IIIII) .. .
x I L 1 . l 1 i 1
30¢. )0 2:300 2000 1 Bill l l 000 500
F2

38

Her /2e/ and /e/ are widely separated, with /ae/ clearly a low vowel, not fronted or

raised, and /8/ very high. Also, her /(1/ is well back, almost in line with the other back

vowels. Many ﬁrst generation Mexican Americans in Lansing are about her age or a little
older —— she would have been 44 in 2005 — and so may have been exposed to a similar
dialect of English before they came north to Michigan.

There are two differences between this chart and some of the others provided by
Thomas, however, which reveal substantial variation between speakers. In several of the

charts presented as typical, the speaker has an average position for /£/ that is noticeably

higher than the average of /o/ — in the most extreme speaker, the height of lae/ is the

same as the height of /A/, although it is still well below the height of /e/ in all speakers.l9

Therefore, for some ﬁrst generation Mexican Americans from Texas, the relative position
of /ze/ in NCS speech is not dramatically different from its relative position in their Texas
dialect of English. The implication of this perceptual similarity for the dialect of English
that is emerging among Mexican Americans in Lansing is discussed in section 3.3.1.
Another major difference between the speaker whose vowels are represented in
Figure 2.5 and the speech of some of the other Mexican Americans from Texas whose

vowel charts are Shown in Thomas (2001) is that over half of them have the low back, or

/o./~/o/, merger. The charts indicate that merger of these two vowels is not strictly

correlated with age or location, but is instead a feature that has been adopted from the

Speech of local Anglos. Thomas (2001: 140) reports that the /a/~/o/ merger in Anglo

 

'9 Thomas recently conﬁrmed this ﬁnding by commenting that he found an average for
/w/ that is higher than local Anglo /ae/ to be common in the speech of the Mexican
Americans he interviewed in Texas (personal communication).

39

speech has now spread throughout most of the state. In contrast, /0/ and /o/ are well

separated in the speech of all those interviewed for the present study — as they are in the
speaker whose vowels are represented in Figure 2.5. While analysis of the reading

passage or conversational data might reveal some merger, this is unlikely because the

standard deviations for both /0/ and /o/ tended to be very small, with no overlap.

Figure 2.5 is included here because this speaker is the same age as many ﬁrst
generation Mexican Americans in Lansing, and She appears to be more representative of
conservative Mexican American English than some of the others because she does not
exhibit the low back merger. She is not intended to represent all Mexican Americans
from Texas, however. The differences between her vowel chart and some of the others

make it somewhat difﬁcult to generalize about the speech of Mexican Americans in

Texas; however, the fact that no participant in the current study has merged /o/ and /3/

indicates that this aspect of variation in the English of Mexican Americans in Texas has
not had a strong inﬂuence on the current dialect found among Mexican Americans in

Lansing.

2.5.4 Spanish

The fourth linguistic inﬂuence that must be taken into account is Spanish. All of the
respondents who were born in Michigan or arrived in Michigan by the age of 3 are either
native speakers of English or began English with primary school. Of the eleven
respondents who arrived in Michigan after the age of 3, eight came from Texas and three

came from Mexico. The eight participants who came from Texas all reported learning

40

Spanish as a ﬁrst language and beginning English in primary school. Therefore, they
came north as bilinguals who spoke both Spanish and English. The three participants who
came straight from Mexico, however, were monolingual Spanish speakers before they
arrived in Michigan. It is likely that those who came to Michigan speaking only Spanish
have assimilated their speech to the dialect of the majority Mexican American
community in Lansing —— whose members are mostly from Texas, although many have
ancestors from Mexico. The degree to which this dialect still shows substrate inﬂuence
from Spanish is expected to be comparable with results from other ethnic minority
communities in which, by the third generation, most people are monolingual speakers of
English. Although the ethnic minority dialect may differ from the local mainstream
Anglo norm, studies have shown that the links to the heritage language are often not
direct or obvious (Labov 2001: 247). Figure 2.6 shows the averaged Spanish vowel
pattern for several men from Madrid. NO raw data is available for Mexican Spanish, but,
as discussed below, there is no evidence that this vowel positioning would be different in

Mexican Spanish.

41

Figure 2.6: Mean scores of Spanish vowels for four men from Madrid.

(data from Bradlow 1995: 1918)

 

350‘

500*

Fl (“2)

650*

 

 

 

800 . r .
2650 2162.5 1675 1187.5 700

F2 (Hz)

The evenly spaced ﬁve-vowel system of Spanish is quite common among languages of

the world. Phonetically, it has none of the vowels involved in the Northern Cities Shift,

although the Spanish vowel /a/ is similar in production to an NCS /o/ because it is

pronounced in a more central position than an unshifted American English /o/20. Tsuzaki

 

20 The IPA symbol [a] is used by Bradlow (1995) and is the symbol commonly used to
represent this vowel in phonetic studies on both Spanish and Italian, although it is
characterized as a low front unrounded vowel (Ladefoged 1993 and others). This symbol
is used to represent the phoneme, as well, although it is not phonemically contrastive in

42

(1970: 38), who investigated the inﬂuence of English on the Mexican Spanish of ﬁrst
generation speakers in Detroit who had migrated from Texas and Mexico, also describes
Mexican Spanish /a/ as a “low central vocoid, including a set of nondiscretely scattered

phones ranging from [m>] to [a<].”2| Godinez (1981), for the Spanish of Tijuana,

Mexico, reports similar placement of /a/ in the vowel space. /a/ is, therefore, the NCS

vowel most likely to be affected by Spanish, since it is also a low central vowel in its

realization and is therefore produced in a position close to where Spanish /a/ is produced.

2.6 Summary

This chapter outlined the setting, participants, social and linguistic variables, and
methodology of the study. The various linguistic inﬂuences that may have affected the
variety of English spoken by Mexican Americans in Lansing have also been discussed.

Chapter 3 presents the results from ANOVA’s performed on the normalized F1 and F2 of

/$, 8, a, 3/ across the social variables of sex, generation in Michigan, socioeconomic

status, linguistic background and age. Among these variables, the strongest variation
occurs between age groups. The results for age are also compared to measurements of
these same four vowels in the speech of the young Anglo women from the Detroit

suburbs (Figure 2.2).

 

Spanish. The symbol is also used to represent the phoneme that contrasts, for example,
with low back lol in Danish (Ladefoged 1993, 224). Both /a/ and /o/ are used in the
literature to represent the American English low back vowel. However, since it contrasts
phonemically with low front /a=:/, the symbol /a/ is more accurate.

2' The symbols > and < indicate backed and fronted, respectively.

43

CHAPTER 3: Statistical Results
This chapter begins with a discussion of the overall vowel pattern found among members

of Lansing’s Mexican American speech community then presents the variation that is

apparent between social categories in the pronunciation of the vowels /ae, e, a, o/.

Figure 3.1 shows the normalized vowel space for both men and women, with

men’s averages represented by squares and women’s averages represented by circles.

Figure 3.1: Normalized means for all 32 respondents. Men (N = 17) = squares;
Women (N = 15) = circles.

 

200

 

 

 

1000 . . _.
3150 2537.5 1925 1312.5 700
52 (El). -

 

.-mw..... ., ..—..........r.w-i.—.."hm-Ma- ...... ............A -~ mun—..wM.—......-u-—-e-.-......4... ..

The most obvious difference between men and women is that the women have a larger

acoustic range than the men, especially in the low vowels and the front vowels. This is

44

primarily for physiological reasons that are unrelated to the NCS, as suggested by the
regularity of this effect, and this difference is not completely overcome by the
normalization procedure used here and in most sociophonetic investigations (Adank,
Smits and van Hout 2004: 3103). The vowels of both men and women are in very similar
relative positions, however. Since studies have shown that women are usually the leaders
of linguistic change in progress (Labov, Yaeger and Steiner 1972; Eckert 1988; Ito 1999),
women‘s and men’s vowel patterns would be expected to differ noticeably if aggressive
change were underway. The fact that the vowel patterns do not differ suggests a stable
dialect in this community. More detailed analysis further supports this conclusion,
although some variation correlated with social variables is apparent, especially in the

results for the vowel /ae/.

The relative positions of /ae, e, o, o/ in Figure 3.1 are also similar to the relative

positions of these vowels in the speech of the middle-aged Anglo woman from rural

Michigan who was recorded in 1970 for DARE (Figure 2.4). One particular similarity is

that the vowels /$/ and /e/ are very close together”. In contrast, /ae/ and /e/ are quite far

apart in the Texas speaker’s vowel space (Figure 2.5), with /ae/ low and central and /e/

high and front. As noted above, several Texas speakers in Thomas (2001) were found to

have a raised /a3/, but /a:/ was still well below /8/ in all cases. In the speech of the young

Detroit women (Figure 2.2), /$/ and /e/ are at the same height but well separated,

 

22 Although standard deviations are not shown in Figure 3.1, for purposes of
simpliﬁcation, the standard deviations of /ae/ and /e/ overlap almost completely in both
men’s and women’s speech.

45

primarily due to the backed position of /e/ (Figure 3.9), which is associated with an

advanced stage of the NCS (Labov 1994: 195).
Another Similarity between the overall vowel pattern of the respondents for this

study and that of the older Anglo woman whose vowel chart is presented in Figure 2.4 is

the relative positions of /a/ and /8/ along the F2, or front/back, dimension. One diagnostic

measure of Northern Cities Shiftedness used by Labov is the relative positions of these

two vowels. The closer /u/ and /e/ are to being in vertical alignment, the more shifted the

speaker is considered to be (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2005). According to this measure,

the Detroit women (Figure 2.2), who Show /e/ directly above /o/, are judged to be very

shifted, whereas the Lansing Mexican American speakers (Figure 3.1), who have a mean

F2 for /8/ that is over 500 Hz higher than the mean F2 of /a/ for both men and women, are

considered more similar to the Gaylord Speakers and not shifted in this regard. For the
reasons mentioned above, the overall vowel conﬁguration of Mexican Americans in
Lansing resembles a conservative version of the NCS with several unique characteristics
that are discussed further below.

The rest of this chapter provides statistical results across the social variables of
generation, socioeconomic status, linguistic background and age to ﬁrrther illustrate and

clarify this general picture.

46

3.1 Generation and Socioeconomic Status

In addition to similar overall vowel conﬁgurations for male and female respondents,
another indication of the stability of this dialect is that ANOVA results revealed no
statistically signiﬁcant variation within gender based on generation of residence in
Lansing or socioeconomic status. As discussed in section 2.3.2, most respondents fell
within a narrow range of scores with regard to socioeconomic status, presumably because
of the relatively short history of Lansing’s Mexican American community and the
common roots of many of its members; so, it is not surprising that no signiﬁcant
linguistic variation correlated with this variable.

With regard to generation, a possible explanation for why ﬁrst generation
respondents do not have a signiﬁcantly different vowel pattern from respondents who
were born in Michigan may be that all of the ﬁrst generation speakers interviewed have
been living in Lansing for most of their lives (see Table 2.1, p. 24). Of the eleven ﬁrst
generation respondents, seven came to Michigan as children—three straight from Mexico
and four from Texas—and they may have acquired the local phonology quickly. This
possibility is further investigated below in the discussion on length of residence. The
remaining four ﬁrst generation respondents began speaking English in primary school in
Texas, came to Michigan between the ages of 21 and 24, and are either married to a
Michigan native or have lived in Lansing for over 30 years. In addition, all 4 have jobs in
which they interact constantly with the public.

Phonetic accommodation to local ethnic group norms by adults was also found by

Knack (1991) in her research on Jewish speakers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In order to

establish a baseline for comparison, Knack performed a general survey of high school

47

students in Grand Rapids, and found the pronunciation of /o/ to be Northern Cities
Shifted—low, front and unrounded, approaching [a]. Labov (1966) had found a quite
different high /3/ that was closer to [0] among New Yorkers, and especially Jewish New
Yorkers. Knack consequently found a correlation in the Jewish Grand Rapids speakers
between high /3/ and a combination of heavy involvement in the Jewish community and
close friends who were Jewish New Yorkers”. This was even true for people who had

not met their New York friends until they were adults. She, therefore, drew the

conclusion that “the speech behavior of the Jewish participants has changed in a
consistent way in their adult lives” (1991: 261).

The Lansing data does not Show, of course, that all Mexican Americans living in
Lansing have the same accent. But the overall results of this study indicate the existence
of a stable dialect, with its own norms of pronunciation, in the settled Mexican American

community.

3.2 Linguistic Background as a Variable

The linguistic history of Mexican Americans in Lansing is extremely complex, and that
complexity is reﬂected in the diversity found among respondents for this study. Although
all of the participants have lived in Lansing for a good part of their lives, most have

Texas heritage, and none of them learned English after the age of 14, this still leaves

 

23 Of the Jewish people in Grand Rapids at that time who were not born in Grand Rapids,
more were born in New York than anywhere else (12% of the total population).

48

room for a great deal Of variation. Table 3.1 shows the distribution of respondents across

the variables of sex and linguistic background.

Table 3.1: Cell distribution across sex and linguistic background

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NES ESL OENG OENG2 OESL
Men 10 2 2 2 1
Women 6 3 2 2 2
Legend:

NES = born in Michigan or moved there by the age of 3; learned English as a ﬁrst
language; ﬁve of the sixteen are bilingual

ESL = born in Michigan; began learning English in primary school

OENG = not born in Michigan but moved there between the ages of 10 and 14; native
speaker of English

OENG2 = not born in Michigan but moved there between the ages of 21 and 24; began
learning English in primary school

OESL = not born in Michigan but moved there between the ages of 10 and 14, learned
English in Michigan

Although most cells have at least two people in them, the data is skewed by an uneven

distribution of age across cells. For example, all NES female respondents are under 25.

Furthermore, there are no male speakers under 25 — and only one female speaker under

25 — in any of the non-NES cells (Appendix E). This reﬂects the cultural history of the

community, but since age is a crucial factor in this group, as discussed in the following

section, more data would be needed to draw clear conclusions about 1) the inﬂuence of

learning English as a second language as a child and 2) age of arrival to Michigan, on the

English of these speakers. Regardless of the variation found due to this factor, there is

nonetheless evidence of a stable and unique accent within this speech community that is

independent from the local mainstream accent.

49

3.3 Age

This section presents ﬁrst and second formant values for the four vowels /a::, e, a, o/ as

they are correlated with the social factors of age group and sex. Although results for men
are mentioned below when they are signiﬁcant, the emphasis is on women’s results
because young women do appear to be the leaders of change in this community, as in
many others. A comparison of the normalized vowel means of the young Mexican
American women with the normalized vowel means of several young Anglo women from
the Detroit suburbs gives some indication of the degree to which this speech community
has been affected by the NCS. When the F1 and F2 averages of the young Mexican
American women match those of the young Detroit women, it is concluded that the
young Mexican American women have assimilated to the Northern Cities Shift. When
there is a mismatch, however, the possible effects of language and dialect contact on the
members of the Mexican American speech community in Lansing are examined. Since
the pronunciation of /a3/ is perhaps the most widespread and perceptually distinct marker

of the shift, statistical results for this vowel are discussed ﬁrst.

3.3.1 Results for lee/

Only non-prenasal /m/ tokens are used in the analysis presented in this chapter (see
Appendix A). Previous studies have found that the pre-nasal environment is often
correlated with extreme raising in the pronunciation of NCS /ae/ (Labov 1994, Thomas
2001). Degree of raising of pre-nasal /a/ in Lansing’s Mexican American speech
community appears to be closely correlated with age, sex, and generation of residence, as

discussed in Chapter 4 below. The pattern that emerges is consistent with the ﬁnding

50

reported by Thomas (2001) that, in general, /ae/ is not raised pre-nasally in the English of
Mexican Americans in Texas. Since the social distribution of this feature in the Lansing
respondents is complex, and phonological environment is not taken into consideration in
the analysis of the normalized data, only non-prenasal /ze/ tokens were used in the
statistical tests that produced the results presented in this chapter.

As outlined in Chapter 2, the fronting and raising of /ae/ is believed to be the
oldest feature of the NCS (Labov, Yaeger and Steiner 1972, Labov 1994) and has also
been found to be the ﬁrst stage of the NCS in its geographical diffusion through Anglo
communities (Ito 1999, Callary 1975). Tensing, which causes movement to the periphery
of the vowel space and is referred to as fronting, is correlated with a higher F2 and is
thought to be a prerequisite of raising in the NCS (Labov, Yaeger and Steiner 1972, Ito
1999). Fronting does not appear to precede raising among older Mexican American
women in Lansing, however. Figure 3.2 shows the results — for female respondents only

—— of an ANOVA that tested the effect of age group and sex on the normalized F2 of /ae/.

51

Figure 3.2: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 290)
Dependent variable = normalized F2 /a:/; Independent variable = Age group
Degrees of freedom = 2; F-ratio = 7.84; p = 0.0005

   

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

2200 ll
21001, 2057 2077 2066
20004 ,. :25 1979
1900 j

I
1800 -
1700 1 4 , L- L,

14-24 25-44 45+ MI Anglo 19-

25

In Figure 3.2, and the charts to follow in this chapter, a black border around a bar
indicates that there is a statistically signiﬁcant difference between the value of that bar
and the value of one or more of the non-bordered bars (excluding the bar for Anglo
women), at a probability level of less than .05. For example, the two bordered bars
representing average F2 for women under 45 in Figure 3.2 signify that both groups of
women under 45 are signiﬁcantly more fronted in their pronunciation of /a:/ than women
45 and over.

The ANOVA shows age group to be signiﬁcant at a probability level of 0.0005,
and a Tukey posthoc test reveals the source of the variation. The F2 average for the seven
women in the 14 to 24 year old age group is 78 Hz higher than the F2 average for the

three women 45 and over, a difference that is signiﬁcant at a probability level of 0.0032.

52

The F2 average for the ﬁve women in the 25 to 44 year old age group is 98 Hz higher
than the F2 average for women 45 and over, a difference that is signiﬁcant at a
probability level Of 0.0004.

Figure 3.2 also shows that the average F2 of /ze/ in female respondents under 45
matches the young Detroit women. The dark grey bar on the far right represents the
young Anglo Michigan women, who are between the ages of 19 and 25 and are clearly
shifted in their speech (Figure 2.2). The averages for the Anglo women cannot be
compared statistically to the data for the Mexican American women because data on
individual tokens for each Detroit speaker are not available. Since the bars for women
under 45 are the same height as the bar for the young Detroit women, however, it appears
that accommodation to this characteristic of the NCS is complete in younger women in
this community. ANOVA and Tukey results for men show no statistically signiﬁcant
variation between age groups for the F2 of /ae/.

Figure 3.3 presents a comparison of F1 averages for /w/ by age group for female

respondents.

53

Figure 3.3: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 290)
Dependent variable = normalized F1 /ze/; Independent variable = Age group
Degrees of freedom = 2; F-ratio = 0.0981 ; p = 0.9066

 

 

700 1
769 767 773
‘ 793
800 —,
I
900 3
I
1000 ‘ . .....,,,-_,,ET,.,L waw—T.
14-24 25-44 45+ MI Anglo 19-
25

This time, neither ANOVA nor Tukey uncovered any variation between age

groups in women. Average F1 is virtually identical across all three groups of Mexican

American women and also matches that of the young Detroit women. Combined results

for F1 and F2 in the speech of female respondents indicate, therefore, that the oldest

female speakers have an /m/ that is raised, but not fronted, to NCS levels. This means that

raising of /a:/ precedes fronting in these speakers, a ﬁnding that is contrary to previous

hypotheses and may be due to dialect contact, as discussed in the next section.

As shown in Figure 3.4, results are slightly different for the average F1 of /ae/

compared across age groups in men.

54

Figure 3.4: Results for male respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 319)
Dependent variable = normalized F1 /ae/; Independent variable = Age group
Degrees of freedom = 2; F-ratio = 04.9503; p = 0.0076

 

 

600 ‘1
698
700 -
800 -
900 1— -.
14-24 25-44 45+

The ANOVA shows age group to be signiﬁcant at a probability level of 0.0076. A Tukey
posthoc test reveals that the two youngest and six oldest men pronounce this vowel at a
similar height, while the nine men in the 25 to 44 year old age group have a signiﬁcantly
higher, or more NCS-like, pronunciation. The F1 average for men 14-24 is 31 Hz lower
than the F1 average for men 25 to 44, a difference that is signiﬁcant at a probability level
of 0.0397. The F 1 average for men 45 and over is 21 Hz lower than the F1 average for
men 25 to 44, a difference that is signiﬁcant at a probability level of 0.0000. That men in
the middle age group have a slightly more raised—or NCS-like—pronunciation of /a=:/
than older men is not surprising. The height of lae/ as produced by the youngest men is
puzzling, however, and invites ﬁrrther investigation. An ANOVA that compared both age

group and sex showed no interaction between these variables, and a Tukey posthoc test

55

revealed no statistically Signiﬁcant differences between age group in men when the data
for both men and women was combined. This suggests that the variation found in men
when they are compared in isolation is not strong enough to be signiﬁcant overall.

To summarize the results for /ae/, all age groups of female Mexican American
respondents are at NCS levels for the height of this vowel. Only female respondents under
45 have accommodated to the F2, or front/back, position of NCS /ae/, however. Within
men, no signiﬁcant differences between age groups emerged for either F1 or F2 except the
minor variation mentioned above. The lack of difference between older and younger men
in the fronting of /m/ suggests that men in this speech community are lagging behind
women in their accommodation to the NCS.

The order of accommodation to the NCS in the speech of at least some members
of this community appears to be different from the order expected if change were
occurring by means of the cascade model of diffusion, a possibility acknowledged by
Labov (2001). A possible explanation for this divergent pattern is discussed in the next

section.

3.3.2: Results for /8/

One reasonable explanation for why raising of /m/ precedes fronting in some members of

this group becomes more clear after an examination of the results for /e/. Figure 3.5 Shows

the average height of /e/ by age group for the female respondents.

56

Figure 3.5: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 102)
Dependent variable = normalized F1 /E/; Independent variable = Age group
Degrees of freedom = 2; F-ratio = 2.6802; p = 0.0735

   

800
770 777
7 735
700 9
600
I
I
500 11.1-_1.. -11 -1....... . .. - #11111..11,_
14-24 25-44 45+ MI Anglo 19-

25

The results for the F1 (height) of /e/ are exactly the same as the results for the F1 of /a:/.

There is no statistically signiﬁcant difference between older and younger speakers — for

either men (not shown) or women. Also, the mean F 1 for the Mexican American women

is nearly identical to the mean F1 for the young Anglo Michigan women. Since even the

oldest group of female speakers has averages for the F1 of /$/ and /e/ that match the

young Detroit women, and men show similar relative positions for both vowels with no

statistically signiﬁcant variation across age group, it can by hypothesized that

accommodation to the local norm for the height of these vowels occurred early in the

development of this speech community.

57

Accommodation to F2 norms is more recent, for /a3/ —appearing only in the
speech of females under 45—and has not yet occurred for /e/, as discussed below. This
is unexpected given that, as mentioned above, tensing (fronting) of /ae/ was thought to
be a prerequisite for raising in the NCS (Labov, Yaeger and Steiner 1972). The result of

this pattern of accommodation was the overlap of /a3/ and /e/ in the F l/F2 vowel space

(Figure 3.1). Perhaps ﬁrst generation speakers who arrived in Michigan before a strong

Mexican American Speech community had formed perceived /m/ and /e/ as very similar to

each other in Michigan speech and accommodated according to this perception.
The situation is somewhat more complex than this, however, since the English of

Mexican Americans in Texas is not homogenous (see section 2.5.3). Relevant here is the

ﬁnding by Thomas (2001) that /ae/ was high relative to /a/ in the Speech of several of his

respondents. Three of the thirteen speakers presented as representative of Mexican

American English in Texas had a mean for /m/ that was roughly 100 Hertz lower —-

indicating a “higher” vowel — than the mean for /o/24. One was a man from Donna,

Texas, born in 1946; the other two were females, one born in 1970 (from “Springville”25)

and the other born in 1971 (from Laredo). Since Donna, Laredo and “Springville” are
not located in the same area of Texas — although none of them are in the north or west

—this characteristic appears to have been widespread, but variable, by the time the

 

24 The vowel charts in Thomas (2001) indicate that, although /m/ is raised in the English
of some Mexican Americans in Texas, it is not raised to the degree found in the NCS.

25 The quotation marks are from Thomas (2001), probably used to indicate that
Springville is not the ofﬁcial name of the town, although this is not explained.

58

interviews were done in 1988 and 1989. For such Speakers, only NCS /t-:/ would sound

dramatically different. Since the pronunciation of NCS /e/ is much closer to [32] than to

[e] or [I], it is likely to be pronounced as [as] by speakers who are not native to the NCS

dialect area but do have /$/ as a phoneme.
In contrast, second generation respondents, who were born in Lansing and learned

English as a native language there, were sensitive to the F2 distinction between /ae/ and

/e/ and reﬂect this in their pronunciation. Figure 2.5 is adapted below as Figure 3.6 to

further illustrate this difference between the ﬁrst and second generation.

Figure 3.6: Vowel chart of a 31-year-old Mexican American woman from San Antonio,

TX, interviewed in 1992 (modiﬁed from Thomas 2001: 189)

 

 

 

 

I Y T r r

400 - ] . u . ~

Q
500 ‘ 1
E I O I
600 e 1
... 1 1
LL.

7”” " r" . _.

P 3' 1

8110 »- (1 .

I
II“
900 ' r
1 1 L '1 . l 1 1 .

301 )0 2:300 2000 1 500 1000 500

F2

59

If we take the chart in Figure 3.6 to be representative of the speech of a Mexican

American from south or east central Texas, the arrows indicate the changes in the

pronunciations of /ae/ and /e/ that would lead to the patterns now attested to in the

Lansing respondents. The arrow pointing forward represents the difference in the
pronunciation of /ae/ by speakers under 45 as compared to speakers over 45.

It is important to point out that identical Fl/F 2 measurements for two vowels does
not necessarily mean that these vowels are merged in a Speaker’s system. For example, an
older ﬁrst generation speaker who arrived in Lansing, from Texas, after the age of 20

would have learned English in Texas and would, therefore, have made a clear distinction

between /ze/ and /e/. There is no reason for such a speaker to lose this distinction upon

encountering a new dialect of English in Michigan. The vowel chart Of just such a

Speaker appears in Figure 3.7.

60

Figure 3.7: Vowel chart for Simona, age 59, came to M1 from TX at 24

 

 

 

 

200
400-
.u
i,
E 1 0' _
:_-._ 600— c. - '0‘
LL.
800 '37 A
Al 3
o
1000 . . .
3150 2537.5 1925 1312.5 700
F2(HZ)

Simona's he/ and /e/ overlap completely, so that the symbols are stacked in Figure 3.7.

There is evidence from other acoustic cues that they are not merged in her phonology,
however. Figures 3.8 and 3.9 shows spectrograrns of Simona's pronunciation of the words

mash and mesh and the same words pronounced by Lucy, a second generation teenager.

61

Figure 3.8: Spectrographic images of words spoken by Simona, age 59, ﬁrst generation

 

’ Illlllllllllllllllil‘i .. _ '

...71711t111111'” .
"mesh" (F1=784, F2=2193) "mash" (F1=819, F2=2189)

Figure 3.9: Spectrographic images of words spoken by Lucy, age 14, second generation

 

“mesh” (F1=823, F2=2159) “mash” (F1=772, F2=2460)

All four of the images show 350 milliseconds of speech. In both speakers, there is a clear

distinction in vowel duration between /ee/ and /e/; in fact, /te/ is consistently longer than

/e/, in general, across all speakers. This is true for respondents who had moved from

Texas only recently, as well, indicating that duration also distinguishes the two vowels in
the English of Mexican Americans in south Texas.

There are two features of Lucy’s speech that are not present in Simona’s

pronunciations of mesh and mash, however. The ﬁrst is that the F2 of /ae/ and /e/ are quite

different in Lucy’s Speech but nearly identical in Simona’s. This is visually recognizable

as the height of the second band in each spectrogram. Their similarity in Simona’s speech

accounts for the overlap of /33/ and /s/ in her vowel chart. Lucy’s /$/ in mash, on the

62

other hand, is considerably fronter than her /e/ in mesh. This is consistent with the ﬁnding

that younger Speakers are fronting /ae/, but Older ones are not.

The second difference between Lucy’s speech and Simona’s occurs at the end of
the vowel. NCS /ae/ is characterized by a centralizing off-glide that ends in a schwa-like
sound. This off-glide is clear and elongated in Lucy’s Speech, stretching her vowel out to

nearly 25 milliseconds and resulting in a low amplitude second steady state that is almost

devoiced, so that mash sounds like [maeoj']. Although more research is necessary in this

area, preliminary results indicate that this off-glide is often absent in ﬁrst generation
speakers, who, like Simona, arrived in Michigan after the age of 20 but does appear in
ﬁrst generation speakers who arrived around the age of 10 or younger. This ﬁnding
concurs with the Flege et a1. (2003) ﬁnding that native Italian speakers in Canada who
arrive in Canada before the age of 14 may achieve near-native speech production ability

in English, especially if they do not speak Italian often. It may be that, although later

arrivals maintain the natively learned distinction between /a3/ and /e/ at the level of

duration, they do not acquire new low-level phonetic cues, such as the F2 difference

between /2e/ and /e/ and the centralizing off-glide of /m/.

The results for the F2 dimension of /e/, presented in Figure 3.10 below, explain

why the distance between /m/ and /e/ is so great in the young Detroit women but is not

large in the Mexican American speakers, even though some have accommodated to the

fronting aspect of /ae/.

63

Figure 3.10: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 102)
Dependent variable = normalized F2 /e/; Independent variable = Age group
Degrees of freedom = 2; F-ratio = 1.6486; p = 0.1975

1700»
I
1800 7

1900 -‘

2000 —'
2100 -‘

2200 .

Although backed /e/ was not found in the 1965 Shuy, Wolfram, and Riley Detroit

recordings, Eckert (1988, 1989) found that /e/ was backed towards [A] in the speech of

working class Detroit teenagers, and Evans et a1. (2000) found this feature again in the
young, middle class suburban Detroiters they interviewed in 1995, who are being used as

a control group here. As ﬁgure 3.10 shows, however, Mexican American women in

1935

14-24

1719
25-44 45+ MI Anglo 19-
25

Lansing have not acquired this feature.

Labov (1994: 195) lists the backing of /e/ as a "new and vigorous change," so it
may not have spread yet to all NCS speakers or NCS areas. Lowering of /e/ is also

described by Labov as a "new and vigorous change," however and, as seen in Figure 3.5,

the Mexican American female respondents have fully accommodated to this feature.

64

Since the Mexican American women are Similar to the Detroit women in F1 of /e/, as

well as in the Fl/F2 of /ae/, their dramatic lack of accommodation to the backed position

ofNCS /8/ may be related to historical consequences of dialect contact instead of lack of

exposure to NCS backed /e/.

It has already been shown that /a3/ and /e/ have overlapping formant values in

older, ﬁrst generation speakers, and that only female respondents under 45 have an /m/

that is fronted to match local Anglo norms. The lack of accommodation to NCS backed

/8/ is consistent with the hypothesis that /a:/ and /8/ were perceived as having the same

formant values by older ﬁrst generation speakers. Since many native NCS speakers

pronounce /a:/ and /e/ at the same height. the overlapping pronunciations of these two

vowels in the Mexican American speakers matched NCS Fl norms, but not F2 norms. It

is plausible that younger speakers are accommodating to the Anglo norms for the F2 of

/a:/ but not for the F2 of /8/ because fronted he/ is a more well established and common

feature and so it is more frequently heard.

The line graph in Figure 3.11 provides an illustration of the results for both sexes.

65

Figure 3.11: Average F2 of /e/ by age group and sex (N = 221)

Dependent variable = F2 /e/; Independent variables = Age group, Sex
Degrees of freedom = 2; F -ratio = 5.97; p = 0.003

1600 -

1700 *

 

1800 4 Me“

1900*1

2000 _. Women

2100 *

 

 

14-24 25-44 45+

There is one apparent discrepancy in the data given in Figure 3.11. The ANOVA run on

the F2 of /e/ across the independent variables of age and sex shows an interaction

between these two variables at a probability level of 0.003. However, a Tukey posthoc
test reveals no statistically signiﬁcant variation between age groups within sex. The
interaction signﬁcance in the variation between men and women clearly lies in the results
for the 14 to 24 year old speakers. Young men have a high F2 relative to older men,
indicating a fronter vowel, and a Tukey posthoc analysis shows the difference to be
signiﬁcant at a probability level of 0.0467. This result is unexpected because it suggests

that men over 25 are more advanced NCS speakers than men under 25. However, the two

male speakers under 25 have a combined total of only thirteen /e/ tokens. Therefore, more

66

evidence is needed to verify whether this is, in fact, a robust tendency among young men

in this speech community.

3.3.3 Results for /a/

The story is different yet again with /a/. Figure 3.12 shows the average F2 of /o/ by age

group for the female respondents.

Figure 3.12: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 186)
Dependent variable = normalized F2 /o/; Independent variables = Age group
Degrees of freedom = 2: F-ratio = 8.2624; p = 0.0004

    

      

 

 

1600 7 1577
1501
1500 a . ., 1484
i 1418
I
i
1300 a
1200 a
l
1100 l ' . “ .
14-24 25-44 45+ MI Anglo 19-
25

The ANOVA analysis shows age group to be signiﬁcant (p = 0.0004), and a Tukey

posthoc analysis shows that women in the 25 to 44 age group have a signiﬁcantly

different F2 for /0/ than either the younger (p = 0.0002) or the older women (p = 0.0296).

67

As illustrated in Figure 3.12, the women in this middle group are signiﬁcantly less
fronted — meaning less NCS-like — than either women under 25 or women 45 and over.
The oldest and youngest groups of women are not signiﬁcantly different from each other,
however. These ﬁndings Show an interesting situation in which teenage and young adult

women are more Similar to Speakers from their grandmothers’ generation than speakers

from their mothers’ generation in the production of /o/. F urtherrnore, although a statistical

comparison of the measurements for the Detroit women and the Lansing Mexican
Americans is not possible because only averages are available for the Detroit women, it

appears that even the young female respondents are somewhat behind the Detroit

speakers in /0/-fronting.

For each age group of women, their pronunciation of /a/ may be the result of

different factors. All three of the women in the oldest age group speak English as a

second language, and two of the three still use Spanish on a daily basis; so, the fronted

position of /0/ in their speech may be a reﬂection of Spanish /a/, which is a central vowel

(Figure 2.6). Mabel (age 45) is the only one of the three who was born in Michigan. Her
parents are from Jalisco, in central Mexico — so she would not have been exposed to
Texas English, and she reports beginning to speak English in primary school. Madeleine
(age 47) came to Michigan from Reynosa Tamaulipas, Mexico, at the age of 12.
Although this is a border town —- near McAllen, Texas — Madeleine said that she did
not begin learning English until she was 10 V2, only a couple of years before coming to
Michigan. It is likely, therefore, that she acquired a Northern Cities shifted variety of

English — inﬂuenced by Spanish but, like Mabel, not inﬂuenced by Texas speech.

68

Madeleine says that she still uses Spanish every day, both at home and at work. Simona
H (age 59) is from Laredo, Texas, and did not move to Lansing until the age of 24. She
also reports that she spoke mostly Spanish until she began primary school, and she still
uses Spanish on a daily basis.

In his theory on phonological acquisition known as the Speech Learning Model,
Flege emphasizes that all the phonemes in a bilingual’s system exist in the same
phonological space (Flege et a1 2003: 469). Therefore, the likelihood of a new phoneme
being created in the system of a speaker who is learning a second language is related to
how close that new speech sound is perceptually to Speech sounds that already exist in
the speaker’s system. The farther away a speech sound is from any other speech sound
perceptually, the more likely a speaker is to create a new phoneme to accommodate that
sound. Otherwise, the sound will be assimilated into an existing phoneme. This appears
to be affected by both age of exposure to the L2 and continued use of the L1.

In a study done on Italian-English bilinguals living in Canada, Flege et al (2003:
487) found that both age of arrival in Canada and degree of continued use of Italian
affected the participants’ production of English vowels. The age range of the participants
in the Flege et al study was 29 to 62, and it is not clear how many participants had begun
speaking English prior to arrival in Canada. All but three of the ninety subjects had lived
in Canada for at least 20 years. Participants who arrived in Canada from Italy between the
ages of 2 and 13 were labeled as “early bilinguals”, and those who arrived in Canada
from Italy between the ages of 15 and 26 were labeled as “late bilinguals” (472). In

addition, participants who reported using Italian between 1% and 13% of the time were

69

labeled “low-Ll-use”, and those who reported using Italian between 25% and 85% of the
time were labeled “high-Ll-use” bilinguals.

Results showed that age of arrival in Canada had the strongest impact on a
speaker’s production of English vowels. Native English speakers judged late bilinguals as
Signiﬁcantly less accurate than early bilinguals in their production of ten of the eleven
English vowels tested (Flege et a1. 2003: 479). Degree of usage of Italian affected
production in both early and late bilinguals, so that late bilinguals who used Italian
frequently were rated as least accurate.

Demographically, the “early-high” group of speakers in the F lege et al. study —
people who had arrived in Canada under the age of 14 and still used their heritage
language frequently —— most closely match the three speakers who are in the oldest
female age group for the present study. Mabel and Simona H are native to English-
speaking areas — a group not tested by the Flege et a1. study, but both of them spoke
Spanish as their ﬁrst language and still use it on a daily basis. The third, Mabel, nicely
ﬁts the Flege et a]. deﬁnition of an early bilingual. She uses Spanish at home, so she may
also qualify for the “high-Ll-use” group.

Early bilinguals, in general, performed much more accurately in the Flege et al.
study than late bilinguals. However, “early-high” were slightly less accurate than “early-
low” speakers in their production of English vowels. This result corresponds with the

ﬁnding in the present study that the three oldest women do not appear to be fully

assimilated to an NCS pronunciation of /0/. Further explanation for a lack of

accommodation to NCS norms in these Speakers’ averages comes from the fact that since

Simona H (age 59) did not move to Michigan until the age of 24, she would have been

70

exposed to NCS speech only as an adult. If Flege’s conclusions are applicable to second
dialect acquisition, then she would not be expected to have accurate pronunciation of
NC S vowels.

The inﬂuence of both a high level of Spanish use (in all three cases) and Texas

English (in Simona’s case) may explain why /a/ has not reached a fully shifted position in
these speakers.26 Since Spanish /a/ is so close to NCS /o/, Flege’s Speech Learning Model

would predict that NCS /0/ would be assimilated by Spanish /a/, especially for the two

speakers who were not born in Lansing. It is not possible to know for sure, however,
since the Spanish of these speakers was not tested. The third speaker, Mabel, who was
born in Lansing, may have acquired the same vowel for both Spanish and English.

Four of the ﬁve female respondents in the middle age group (ages 25 to 44) also reported
learning Spanish as a ﬁrst language.” However, of these four, all of them began speaking
English by the time they were primary school age. Two were born in Lansing and have
lived there all their lives; one is married to a Mexican American man who is a native of
Michigan and does not speak Spanish ﬂuently,28 and one moved to Lansing at 10 and
reports that English is also a native language for her. In addition, all ﬁve either moved to
Michigan from Texas or have parents who are from Texas. These women, therefore, have

been heavily exposed to both NCS speech and the English of Mexican Americans from

 

26 There is some evidence of extreme lowering of /o/ in advanced NCS speakers such as

the young Anglo women from the Detroit suburbs. Very little research has been done on
this aspect of the NCS, however, and it is unclear how widespread this feature is. But see
Corrine McCarthy, Tracking the Northern Cities Shift in Chicago: A Look at Age and
Gender. NWAV 34, New York University, October, 2005

27 Ana (age 28) reports that she does not speak Spanish now and can only understand it.
28 He is also a respondent in this study (pseudonym Ralph).

71

Texas — either by living in Texas or because their parents are natives of Texas — to a

degree that the women in the ﬁrst group have not (except possibly Simona).

This group’s pronunciation of /0/ may be inﬂuenced by the Spanish-inﬂuenced

English of Mexican Americans in Texas (Figure 2.5), in which /0/ is further back in the

vowel space than in either Spanish (Figure 2.6) or NCS English (Figure 2.2). It is also
possible that, in an attempt to resist the very salient Northern Cities Shifted fronted /a/,
this group kept their pronunciation of this vowel backed.

The youngest group of female respondents consists of seven women, ages 14 to
22, six of whom were born in Lansing. Only one, Lola, who is from Mexico City and

moved to Lansing at the age of 10, reports speaking Spanish as her ﬁrst language. Four of

the seven report that they do not speak Spanish. This age and sex group is the most likely

to accommodate to the Northern Cities Shift. If their production of /<1/ is not quite as

fronted as the /(1/ of the young Anglo Detroit women, it may be because of the inﬂuence

of the alternative norms for the pronunciation of this vowel that have already been

established in Lansing’s Mexican American speech community.

3.3.4 Results for /o/

In research on the NCS, the parameters for shifted /o/ are not well deﬁned. It is described

by Labov as a change that is neither new nor near completion, but “midrange”, with the

direction of change “centralization and fronting” (1994: 195). Gordon (2001) comments

that previous research on NCS /0/ has characterized it as “lowered, fronted, and

72

unrounded to approach [0]” (2001: 16). There are several detailed impressionistic studies

on NCS inﬂuence that include /0/ (Knack 1991, Gordon 2001), and several

instrumentally-based studies that include information on /o/, as well (Labov, Yaeger and

Steiner 1972, Eckert 1988). The point at which /0/ can be considered shifted is not made

clear, however. As with the other NCS vowels, the strongest indication of Shiftedness is
its position relative to other vowels within an individual speaker’s system. The closer it is
to the bottom and middle of the vowel space, the more shifted it is considered to be.

This abstract framework is, nevertheless, useful as a starting point for a discussion

of /o/ in the speech of Mexican Americans in Lansing. Figure 3.1 is adapted as Figure

3.13, with the addition of larger faint circles around the means that represent one standard
deviation. It shows the normalized vowel space for the ﬁfteen female Mexican American

respondents.

73

Figure 3.13: Normalized means for female Mexican American respondents. (N=158)

 

 

 

 

200
400-
1 u
;o

E C I U
1: 600*
b:

800- 0

a
1000 . . .
3150 2537.5 1925 1312.5 700
F2 (Hz)

Variability can occur both between speakers and within individual speakers, based on

phonetic environment, and vowels in transition—such as /a°., e, o/—tend to have large
standard deviations”. The fact that the position of /0/ varies only minimally across 158
tokens and ﬁfteen speakers indicates that this is not a vowel in transition. F ormant values
for /0/ in this speech community — in both men and women — are more stable than for

any other vowel, and no signiﬁcant variation appears between age groups within sex. As

 

29 The large standard deviation for [u] is caused by the effect of phonetic environment,

which had a strong inﬂuence due to the small number of wordlist words that included this
vowel.

74

illustrated in Figure 3.14, however, the means for /o/ in female Mexican American

respondents differ considerably from the mean for /o/ in the young Detroit women,

indicating that this vowel is not Northern Cities shifted, either.

Figure 3.14: Results for female respondents only of ANOVA analysis (N = 155)

Dependent variable = F l /o/; Independent variables = Age group
Degrees of freedom = 2: F-ratio = 0.7978; p = 0.4522

Dependent variable = F2 /o/: Independent variables = Age group
Degrees of freedom = 2; F-ratio = 2.3610: p = 0.0978

1500 - 1411
1400—
1200
1100 —
1000 . 948
900 j 805 801 790
800 a
700 -
600 '
500-
400 -
300 : ~ - v
bl D- x 6) D3 D: x ‘0
:1; J" ‘9 51/ :1, .°‘ ‘9 51/
K,” ’15" 7‘ 0'9 x!" ’f’ 7‘ 0:9
\ \
veg veg
e“ e“
F1 F2

The differences between the Lansing Mexican American women and the Detroit Anglo

women in F1/F2 means for this vowel are larger than for any other vowel—133 Hz to

158 Hz for F1 and 180Hz to 22le for F2. Unlike the vowels /2e/ and /e/, which are

75

distinguished by both duration and off-glide in the NCS, /o/ and /0/ run the risk of merger

if they get too close perceptually. In order for /0/ to “centralize and front” as

characterized by Labov, room must be cleared for it to do so, but, as shown above /0/ has

not fronted as far as is typical in NCS speech (Figure 3.12), so it is possible that /o/ is

resisting movement due to the position of /a/. The position of /0/ indicates strong northern

inﬂuence, since the /o/~/o/ merger has been found to be widespread in the speech of both

Anglos and Mexican Americans in Texas (Thomas 2001). It may be that the Lansing

Mexican American speech community was established by speakers who came north

before the low back merger was widespread in Texas, but also before /0/ had lowered and

fronted dramatically in NCS speech. Another possible explanation is that /A/ is in the

way. /A/ is also in a dramatically different position in the system of the study participants

than in the system of the young Detroit women. In either case, the back vowels appear to
be less affected by the NCS than the front vowels.

The ANOVA results Show that there is an interaction between the independent

variables of age group and sex for the F1 of /o/. Figure 3.15 is a line graph Showing the

F1 of /0/, by age group and sex.

76

Figure 3.15: Average Fl of/o/ by age group and sex (N = 335)

Dependent variable = F1 /o/; Independent variables = Age group, Sex
Degrees of freedom = 2; F-ratio = 4.02; p = 0.0189

 

 

 

 

 

 

850 -
800 7 . +

‘0 Women
750 i.

a Men
700 ~
650 4
600 ,»1__________,_ -- -- —___ ,1-.- 1

14-24 25-44 45+

Tukey posthoc analysis does not show that any of the differences between age groups,
within sex, are statistically signiﬁcant, however, indicating that the difference between
the men’s and women’s patterns for this vowel is not robust enough to draw useful
conclusions. The smaller number of men under 25 in the study may have caused this

apparent interaction.

77

3.4 Summary

The general pattern found in the NCS vowels among respondents for this study is
surprisingly constant across age groups, but only partially inﬂuenced by the NCS. The
only signiﬁcant variation based on age group to emerge is that Mexican American
women under 45 in Lansing appear to have fully accommodated to the relative F1 and F2
norms of NCS /te/, while women over 45 have accommodated only to F1. Results for
men show no variation across age groups. In Mexican American women under 45, the
position of /m/ is both fronted and raised to a degree that is comparable to its position in
the speech of young women from the Detroit suburbs, who are members of the
demographic group that is leading the change. Preliminary results also indicate that
respondents who are native to Lansing have acquired the centralizing off-glide that is
characteristic of NCS /ae/.

So far, these results are consistent with the conclusion that members of the
Mexican American speech community in Lansing are following the order of
accommodation to the NCS that has been observed previously in Anglo speech
communities (Ito 1999, Evans 2001). Similarities to the ﬁndings of previous studies on
the NCS end here, however. Evidence suggests that the order of accommodation to the
NCS among Mexican Americans in Lansing does not match the order of NCS changes
suggested by Labov (I994: 195). For example, female respondents over 45 appear to
have a position for /2e/ that is raised but not fronted, a result that contradicts the proposal
by Labov, Yaeger and Steiner (1972) that /ae/-fronting precedes /ze/-raising in the NCS.
Labov (1994: 429) comments that “In the Northern Cities Shift, all short a (=/ae/) words

are tensed and raised.” Therefore, the lack of fronting (equated with tensing) in the

78

speech of these women indicates that they are not Northern Cities Shifted, at least

according to Labov’s criteria.

Regarding accommodation to other vowels, /(1/, which is listed by Labov (1994:

195) as the second vowel to Shift, is not yet fronted to NCS levels (although a statistical

comparison of F2 values for Mexican American women and the Detroit Anglo women is

not available to verify this impression). The vowel /o/, which is listed by Labov

(19942195) as the third vowel to be affected by the shift, is dramatically different in

pronunciation between Mexican American respondents and the young Detroit women.

A lack of accommodation to NCS /0/ would not be irregular if /8/ were also

unshifted in these speakers. But /e/, which is typically thought to be shifted only in

speakers who also Show the ﬁrst three stages, is lowered to NCS levels in these speakers,

so that F1 is Similar between the Mexican American women and the young Detroit

women. The F2 of /e/ does not match local Anglo norms, however, such that /e/ is much

further back in the vowel space of the Detroit women than in the vowel space of the
Mexican American women.

The result is that, in the speech of most of the Mexican American respondents, /x/

and /e/ are very close, overlapping almost completely in about half of the respondents —

especially the older, ﬁrst generation speakers——although a distinction in duration is still
maintained by all speakers. It is likely that these two vowels were perceived as similar,

and consequently produced Similarly, by speakers not native to an NCS region. The

79

cultural and linguistic past of Lansing’s Mexican American community has given rise to
the creation of a dialect that is both local and unique.

Vowels in transition often show great variability based on phonetic environment.
In addition, different dialects may exploit and exaggerate different conditioning factors,
leading to variation across dialects. One distinctive feature of the NCS, for example, is an
extremely high /ae/ before nasals. Chapter 4 examines the pronunciation of /ae/ in various
phonetic environments among respondents who are native speakers of English, in order
to gain further insight into the extent to which the NCS is inﬁltrating the speech of

members of this community.

80

CHAPTER 4: Influence of Phonetic Environment on the Production of lee/
Based on the results of Chapter 3, it appears that Mexican American women under 45 in
Lansing have accommodated fully to an NCS pronunciation of the vowel /m/. Analysis of
the coarticulatory effects of adjacent segments provides a more complex picture,

however.

4.1 Previous Research
Laboratory studies on the conditioning effects of phonetic environment on vowel formant
frequencies in English have generally paid little attention to dialect variation. In an early

study, Stevens and House (1963) measured formant frequency values for three men

pronouncing the eight vowels /i, 1, e, as, o, A, u, u/ in the following three environments:

1) in isolation, 2) in /th/ syllables, and 3) in stressed, symmetrical CVC syllables,

preceded by unstressed /ha/ (e.g., /habe/, /hodVd/, etc.) with the 14 consonants /p, t, k,

b, d, g, f, v, s, z, 0, 8, tj, 05/. Surprisingly, no signiﬁcant F1 or F2 differences were found

between the ﬁrst two environments — vowels in isolation and in /erd/ syllables;
therefore, these two sets of tokens were combined into a category that was somewhat
confusingly labeled the null context (Stevens and House 1963: 116), for purposes of
comparison to other environments. Reﬂecting the contemporary perspective of the ﬁeld,
no additional demographic information was offered on the three informants.

The over-arching result of the Stevens and House study is that consonantal
environment (excluding the /th/ environment) causes vowel centralization, or

undershoot. A number of more speciﬁc systematic effects, some of which are discussed

81

further below, were also found to correlate with manner, voicing, and place of
articulation features of the adjacent consonants.

Hillenbrand, Clark and Nearey (2001) expanded on Stevens and House (1963) in
several ways. They interviewed six men and six women, all but one of whom were from
the same general Northern Cities Shifted dialect area. In order to maintain comparability

with the earlier study, they chose the same eight vowels, and used a subset of the

consonants (initial /h, b, d, g, p, t, k/ and ﬁnal /b, d, g, p, t, k/). The vowels were

recorded in isolation, and in CVC syllables read from a wordlist. The main difference in
procedure from Stevens and House was that every combination of initial and ﬁnal
consonantal context was tested for each vowel, instead of being limited to symmetrical
syllables. Therefore, although this study eliminated the variable of manner by using only
stop consonants, the researchers were able to comment on differences in effect between
initial and ﬁnal consonants. Overall, conditioning environment had minimal effect on
vowel pronunciation in the Hillenbrand et a1. study, but this may be because natural
speech was not elicited due to the extremely controlled nature of the experiment. The
effects they did see largely agreed with Stevens and House, with the additional ﬁnding

that preceding consonants showed larger effects, in general, than following consonants,
especially for F2”. With regard to social factors, Hillenbrand et al. found the same effects

in both men’s and women’s speech.

 

30 This study also included a perceptual experiment, which found unexpected results
when production and perception were compared. The tokens that were most often
confused in the perceptual experiment were not those that were most acoustically
displaced due to phonetic conditioning. The authors offer an explanation based on
relative distance of the token from a prototype.

82

Although the vowel patterns found in these two studies suggest different dialects,
the similarity of results suggests universal tendencies in the coarticulation of speciﬁc
consonants and adjacent vowels, and the issue of whether coarticulatory effects may
differ across dialects is not addressed. Throughout his work, Stevens gives evidence that
the majority of coarticulatory effects found in speech production are not speaker-
controlled but are instead due to “inherent dynamic properties of the articulatory
structures and of the neuromuscular system that controls them” (Stevens and House 1963:
122). Stevens and House do state, however, that phonetic cues can be manipulated by
speakers for the purpose of perceptual contrast and give the example of vowel
lengthening in English before voiced consonants (122). More research is needed in this
area. and the current analysis is intended to contribute to this discussion by providing
information from an ethnic minority dialect with a diverse linguistic past.

The present analysis is concerned with the same general Northern Cities Shifted
dialect area investigated by Hillenbrand et a1. (2001) but takes a more sociolinguistic
approach. For example, in the Hillenbrand et a1. study, speakers who were familiar with

linguistics were asked to read phonetic transcriptions that were blocked by vowel (not
scattered) from a word list.3| In the current study, however, naive speakers were asked to

read actual words, written in regular orthography and presented one-by-one on a
computer screen, to avoid the intonational effects that often accompany reading a list.

Several other sociolinguistic studies on the effects of phonetic environment on

vowel production have been done in this dialect region. Ito (1999) analyzed Anglo

 

3 ' Stevens and House (1963) do not indicate whether or not the three male speakers
recorded were linguistically trained or not. The speakers were asked to read words in the
forrrr of “bisyllabic nonsense utterances in iambic form” (112), but it is not clear if they
were presented as phonetic transcription or using regular orthography.

83

speakers in rural Lower Michigan; Evans (2001) analyzed speakers in Ypsilanti, near
Detroit, who were originally from Appalachia; and Jones (2003) analyzed African
Americans in Lansing. The methodology used in these studies is very similar to the
methodology used in the current study, enabling a comparison of results. Labov (1994:
100) discusses the fronting and raising of /t£/ together as “advancement” into the NCS.
He provides ordered lists of environments that promote this advancement, based on the
results of a few major studies, including his own, in several Northern Cities Shifted areas,
including Detroit. The two environments on which he comments are following manner of
articulation32 and point of articulation (not speciﬁed as preceding or following)”. The

combined results of these studies are discussed below in section 4.3.

4.2 The Study

Of the 32 speakers discussed in Chapter 3, half are both native speakers of English and
lifetime residents of Lower Michigan. This half was chosen for further analysis of the
inﬂuence of conditioning phonetic environment on the pronunciation of /a:/. The sixteen
participants consisted of ten men, ages 14 to 71, and six women, ages 14 to 23. All but
two are second or third generation residents of Lansing. Of the remaining two, one is a
35-year-old man who has only lived in Lansing for 10 years, but has lived in south
central Michigan his entire life. The other is a 71-year-old man who came to Lansing at

the age of 3.

 

32 “The relative degree of advancement is inﬂuenced by the manner of articulation of the
following segment, in the order nasals > voiceless fricatives > voiced stops > voiced
fricatives > voiceless stops,” (Labov 1994: 100).

33 “Point of articulation follows the ordering palatal > apical > labial, velar,” (Labov
1994:100)

84

In the most advanced NCS speakers, /2e/ is pronounced further front and higher in

the vowel space than /8/, ultimately being realized as a high front vowel in some

speakers. As discussed in Chapter 3, this pattern is different than what has been found in
the English of Mexican Americans in south Texas by Thomas (2001) and in Lansing in
the present study. As one indicator of the degree to which a speaker had accommodated

to the NCS, therefore, the relative positions of the mean unnormalized F1 and F2 values

for /ee/ and /8/ were calculated for each individual separately and are listed in Table 4.1.

85

Table 4.1: Relative positions of /ae/ and /e/ in native speakers of MI English

 

 

Pseudonym F1 (norm) of/ay /a3/ relative to /r/ e Age College S ES
(m Hertz) (based on F1/F2 means) Degree
Judith 765 fronted and raised /a:/ F 21 No W
Jose 696 fronted and raised /ae/ M 35 Yes M
Lucy 729 fronted tact F 14 N/A34 M
Estela 703 fronted /a:/ F 17 N/A W
Emelia 694 fronted /a=./ F 20 No W
Solana 731 fronted /ae/ F 22 Yes M
Ralph 662 fronted /a:/ M 41 No M
Edmund 680 fronted /:e/ M 45 Yes M
Andy 722 may = /e/ M 14 N/A W
Rodolfo 702 733/ = /E/ M 27 No W
Melito 677 /$/ = /g/ M 29 No W
Martin 684 /m/ = /e/ M 48 No M
Walter 743 backed /m/ M 71 No W
RonaldB 657 /$/ below /8/ M 16 N/A M
Jesse 668 /ae/ below /g/ M 28 No W

 

The second column of Table 4.1 lists normalized Fl means for /a=:/ and shows that only

two speakers have a normalized F1 above 750 Hz. 700 Hz (normalized) is considered

Northern Cities Shifted by Labov, Ash and Boberg (2005), so most of these speakers are

shifted or close to shifted in their pronunciations of /a:/, which agrees with the results

 

34 N/A indicates that the speaker was too young to be in college at the time of the

interview.

86

presented in Chapter 3. Examination of the position of /a=:/ allophones relative to /e/

allophones further distinguishes the respondents.

The third column in Table 4.1 gives the position of the average for tokens of /ae/

relative to the position of the average for tokens of /e/ in the vowel space, based on T-

tests done in Plotnik. For example, Lucy has a mean F2 for /a:/ that is different from her

mean F2 for /e/ at a probability level of S .05, such that /ae/ is signiﬁcantly further front

in the vowel space than /e/. But her Fl means for the two vowels are not Signiﬁcantly

different. The difference in means for /38/ and /e/ is signiﬁcant in both F l and F2 for only

two speakers, Judith and Jose, who are at the top of the list. In these speakers, /a=:/ is

fronted and raised in relation to /e/, which is typical of an advanced NCS system and

suggests that Judith and Jose are more advanced into the NCS than any of the other

speakers.

The next six speakers have an /$/ that is fronted in relation to /8/ but is not raised

above /e/. This is not surprising given that many Anglo NCS speakers, including the

young Detroit women discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, do not raise /ae/ above /e/ either. The

F 1/F2 means for /m/ and /e/ in the next four speakers on the list are not signiﬁcantly

different between vowels. Overlapping means are common in the speech of people who
exhibit only incipient or conservative accommodation to the NCS, as may be the case

with these speakers. Finally, the last four respondents listed in Table 4.1 have non-NCS

vowel conﬁgurations, in which /a:/ is backer or lower than /e/.

87

In the following analysis of environment, the top eight speakers in Table 4.1, who
appear to be more affected by local norms than the others, are grouped together and
referred to as Group A. Both gender and level of education have been strongly correlated
with accommodation to local standards in previous studies, and it is notable that, out of
these sixteen participants, the three who have college degrees and all but one of the
young women are included in Group A. Ralph, the only Group A respondent who is
neither a woman nor a college graduate, is a monolingual speaker of English who works
in sales at an upscale department store and presumably must conform to accepted norms
to fulﬁll the requirements of his occupation.

The next section presents an analysis of how /w/ patterns allophonically and the
extent to which it seems to follow the same rules of conditioning environments that have
been found previously. If some environments promote the shift more than others, this
should be observable in terms of relative variation among tokens across individuals. If
phonological environment has no relationship to the shift, then there should be no
difference in environmental effects in people who are strongly inﬂuenced by the shift, as

compared to people whose speech is not strongly inﬂuenced.

4.3 Phonetic conditioning of lee/ production
Table 4.2 presents an ordered list that ranks the effectiveness of conditioning
environment on the pronunciation of /m/, based on a comparison of Labov’s (1994)

results to those of the three Lower Michigan studies mentioned above.

88

Table 4.2: Ranked list of the inﬂuence of consonantal environment on the production of
/ae/, based on the combined ﬁndings of Labov (1994), Ito (1999), Evans (2001) and Jones
(2003)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preceding Consonant Following Consonant
VELAR NASAL
VOICED STOP
APICAL & VOICED F RICATIVE
VOICELESS F RICATIVE
LABIAL
VOICELESS STOP
LIQUID

 

 

 

 

Although the four studies did not ﬁnd identical rankings, they are in agreement with
respect to the ﬁrst and last feature in each environment. The leftmost column in Table 4.2
provides an ordered list of preceding consonant features, beginning at the top with the
factor that most promotes the fronting and raising of /a3/ (velar consonants), and ending at
the bottom with the least promoting factor (liquids). Following the methodology used in
Plotnik, these studies did not test every preceding manner and place environment
separately, but rather tested for only those environments that had been shown previously
to have the strongest conditioning inﬂuence.

The rightmost column gives a similarly ordered list of following consonant
manner features. Although Labov (1994) does include a ranked ordering for following
place of articulation, this factor had little effect on /2e/ in any of the Michigan studies.

Table 4.2 indicates, for example, that /a=:/ in a word such as gamble, which begins
with a velar consonant and ends with a nasal, should be more raised and fronted than /ae/

in any other environment.

89

Eight ANOVA’S were run for each individual. The dependent variables were F1
and F 2, analyzed for the following environmental factors: preceding manner and voice,
preceding place of articulation, following manner and voice, and following place of
articulation. Unlike the previous studies, manner and voice were separated from place of
articulation for preceding environment, so that every possible combination of features
could be tested. In accordance with the ﬁndings of previous studies, the inﬂuence of
following place of articulation was minimal. No signiﬁcant difference between the effects
of any two following place of articulation features was found in more than two speakers,
so those results are not presented here. In addition, only results for other environments
that are signiﬁcant in at least four speakers will be discussed below. The discussion notes,
in particular, the number of Group A speakers for whom these categories are signiﬁcant,

since that may shed light on the relevance of each feature to the NCS.

90

4.3.1 Following Manner and Voice
Five following manner and voice environments were tested: voiced and voiceless stops,

voiced and voiceless fricatives, and nasals. Table 4.3 lists words used by environment”.

Table 4.3: Following Manner and Voice Features and Words

 

 

 

 

 

 

Manner/Voice Words

Voiced Stop tab, cabin, dad, Saginaw, brag, rag
Voiceless Stop apple, nap, zap, pat, mattress, rack, black
Voiced Fricative have, has, jazz

Voiceless Fricative Bath, laugh, ask, past, cash, mash

Nasal Sam, Lansing, plant

 

 

 

 

Excluded (singleton): pal (liquid); badge (affricate); gamble, gang, thank, banker (velar)

The only feature that is Signiﬁcant in at least two speakers is following nasal manner, but
the effects on F1 in this environment are dramatic. Table 4.4 indicates the effects of

following nasal environment on the production of /ae/ for each individual.

 

35 Although the words gamble, gang, thank and banker contain /2e/ in a pre-nasal
environment, they were removed from the analysis because of the strong raising effects
of velar consonants, which would have skewed results.

91

Table 4.4: Results for Raising of /a:/ Before Nasal Consonants
X = statistical signiﬁcance 5 .05 level of probability between pro-nasal /$/ and
/a/ in all other environments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Name Age Overall F l/F 2 means Pre-nasal /ae/, Pre-nasal /ae/,
{/ae/ relative to /£/) raised (F1) ﬁonted (F2)

Judith 21 fronted and raised /ae/ X

Jose 35 fronted and raised /ae/

LucyB 14 fronted /ae/ X

Estela 17 fronted /ae/ X X

Emelia 20 fronted /ae/ X

Solana 22 fronted /ae/ X X

Ralph 41 fronted /ae/ X

Edmund 45 fronted /ae/

Andy 14 /ae/ = /e/ X

Rodolfo 27 /ae/ = /€/

Melito 29 /ae/ = /e/

Martin 48 /ae/ = /8/

Walter 71 backed /ae/

Melinda 16 /ae/ below /8/ X

RonaldB 16 /ae/ below /8/

Jesse 28 /ae/ below /e/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T-test results Show that all six young women, but none of the men, raise /m/ in front of
nasals to a degree that is statistically signiﬁcant at or below the .05 level of probability. In
addition, the only two speakers whose pre-nasal /$/ is both fronted and raised are young

women who also have an overall mean for /ae/ that is fronted, indicating NCS

92

accommodation. There are two other people (out of the 32 participants total) who Show
statistically signiﬁcant fronting and raising of /a:/ before nasals. Both are women under
40 who, although they are speakers of English as a second language, learned English in
Lansing and have lived in Lansing for most or all of their lives. The fact that statistical
signiﬁcance is achieved for these speakers based on only three words per speaker in
which /ae/ appears before a nasal —— Sam, Lansing, plant — underscores how
dramatically different pre-nasal /a2/ is from /:e/ in other environments.

Figure 4.1: Vowel chart for Solana, 22, third generation. Pro-nasal /a:/ = a”

 

 

 

200. l
1
l
1
l
l
., I
4004 l
[’T\ ‘ ‘ 7
7” .117 in 1’ I
i,
t _ .I-
.a i e t . .« 1
N _ \ .. t . , {J I "x .
E 6001317 ‘O/I 1
u: i
I s.
l
l
_ l _.,,.8— . I», 7’ ;
l .- O
l
l
l (d I ,
"X701, 1 r T 7;
3150 2537.5 1925 1312.5 700
F 2 (HZ)

93

Figure 4.1 is the vowel chart of Solana, one of the two young women whose pro-nasal /2e/

is both fronted and raised above non-pre-nasal /$/. Solana’s mean for /a/ before nasals is

very high in her vowel space, near both [e] and [I]. Figure 4.2 shows individual tokens of

/2e/ in Solana’s speech, as graphed in the software Plotnik.

Figure 4.2: Plotnik chart of /38/ tokens for Solana, age 22, third generation

"" Ill-4:345. J. ... .. -'.“'-‘.~ I" 3 » "- ‘33. JVIC, .~ ‘ -' 1‘ “'VIZITTA‘5>?:‘.“‘I~J Emmymka'ﬂin; 3.‘ .‘3‘3'..i'.‘c’.r'- 41h ~~ ~ ' - ‘. . '- aim-1:42.565? Lit“? -J‘ 3.31.111»;- v. '2‘. Jun?

2 00‘ 23007 21050 “2300. ”2000-..- ism.*1§90..,.; .1100 1:309- 1990....890... ...‘690.] , ,.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Except for the word dad, which contains /2e./ between voiced alveolar stops — an

environment that may cause fronting and raising because the constriction involved in the

94

articulation of /d/ causes a lowered F1 and a raised F2 -— Solana’s pro-nasal tokens of /a3/
are the highest /ze/ tokens in her vowel system.

A dramatically raised position for tautosyllabic pre-nasal /ee/ is common in NCS
speech (Labov 1994: 266). To explain this, Labov and others have posited that raising of
/ae/ before nasals is a default feature in American English that is simply exploited to a
more extreme degree in the Northern Cities Shift. However, Thomas (2001) found that
some of the Mexican American speakers of English he interviewed in Texas did not have
an /:e/ that was raised at all before nasals,36 suggesting that there are dialects of American
English in which pre-nasal raising of /a3/ is not a diagnostic feature. More importantly for
the present study, none of the Texas Mexican American speakers whose vowels charts
are shown in his 2001 book have a dramatically raised pre-nasal /ae/. Therefore, the
presence of a high position for pro-nasal /ze/ in all six women under 25 in the present
study indicates strong NCS inﬂuence. In the Mexican American speech community in
Lansing, raising of /ae/ before nasals may be as indicative of NCS inﬂuence as any overall
change in vowel means. Furthermore, if young women are the leaders of change in this
Speech community as in many others, this ﬁnding also indicates that the Mexican
American speech community in Lansing is headed towards full accommodation to NCS
patterns in the production of /w/.

Neither Stevens and House (1963) nor Hillenbrand, Clark and Nearey (2001)
examined vowels in the nasal environment. Stevens and House state “nasal consonants

were not included because of the difﬁculties of measuring formant frequencies for

 

6 . .
3 Personal communication.

95

nasalized vowels” (112). Hillenbrand et al. focus on stop consonants and make no
comment about nasal environment.

Technology has advanced considerably since Stevens and House published their
article in 1963. For the current study, measurement of vowel tokens in a nasal
environment was done through careful identiﬁcation of the nasal formant, followed by
individual readings for F 1 and F2 in Praat.

Production does not match perception in this situation, however. Evidence shows
that listeners average the ﬁrst oral and nasal formants when perceiving a vowel (Beddor
and Hawkins 1990, Stephens 1998). As pointed out by Plichta (2004), this means that
nasalized he/ will be perceived as higher than oral /&/. Plichta (2004) discovered that
nasalization of vowels, even in an oral environment, is a common feature of NCS Speech,
but perhaps it is most salient perceptually in a pre-nasal context. If so, this provides an
impetus for the genesis of the NCS, in that pre-nasal /ae/ was perceived as raised and
subsequently produced as raised by children learning the dialect as a ﬁrst language,

creating the ﬁrst step in the chain shift.

4.3.2 Preceding Manner and Voice

With regard to preceding manner and voice, the following four environments were tested:
voiced and voiceless stops, voiceless fricatives, and liquids. The words used in each
environment are listed in Table 4.5. Results show that preceding voiced stops are
correlated with a signiﬁcantly lower F1 for /$/ in four of the sixteen speakers. Only one
of these four is a Group A speaker, supporting previous hypotheses that raising after

voiced stops is a universal tendency.

96

Table 4.5: Preceding Manner and Voice Features and Words

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Manner/Voice Words

Voiced Stop banker, bath, dad, gamble, gang, badge
Voiceless Stop cabin, cash, pal, past, pat, tab

Voiceless F ricative Saginaw, Sam, thank

Liquid black, brag, Lansing, laugh, plant, rack, rag
Nasal mash, mattress, nap

/h/ or Vowel Initial apple, ask, has, have

 

 

 

 

Excluded (singletons): zap (voiced fricative), jazz (affricate)

Although preceding manner and voice was not tested separately by the sociolinguistic
studies mentioned, these ﬁndings coincide with Stevens and House (1963) and
Hillenbrand, Clark and Nearey (2001). Since Stevens and House only tested vowels in
symmetrical CVC environments, they make no claims about the inﬂuence of preceding
versus following environment. They do, however, consider /th/ as a null environment,
which implies that preceding /d/ has more inﬂuence than following /d/. Hillenbrand,
Clark and Nearey provide inconclusive evidence on the effects of initial versus ﬁnal
voiced consonants, although, as mentioned above, they did ﬁnd that preceding
consonants have more inﬂuence overall.

Hillenbrand, Clark and Nearey (2001: 755) suggest that one physical
characteristic of voiced consonants that may contribute to the raising effect they have on
adjacent vowels is that the larynx is slightly lower in the production of voiced consonants
than it is in the production of voiceless consonants. Although this in itself may not cause

a lowering of F1, Stevens (1998: 474) discusses changes in F1 that occur in conjunction

97

with the changes in airﬂow, transglottal pressure, vocal tract volume and vocal tract

stiffness that are all associated with the production of voiced stops.

4.3.3 Preceding Place of Articulation

The environments tested here for the effects of preceding place of articulation were
labial, apical, liquid apical, velar, /h/ and vowel initial. The words used are listed by
environment in Table 4.6. Results show that preceding apicals and velars were correlated
with signiﬁcantly raised /ae/ in four male speakers, only two of whom are in Group A.

These results suggest that this effect is not correlated speciﬁcally with the NCS.

Table 4.6: Preceding Place of Articulation Features and Words

 

 

 

 

 

 

Place of Articulation Words

Labial badge, banker, bath, pal, past, pat, mash, mattress
Apical thank, dad, tab, zap, saginaw, sam, nap

Liquid brag, rack, rag, black, lansing, laugh, plant

Velar gamble, gang, cabin, cash

/11/ or Vowel Initial has, have, apple, ask

 

 

 

 

Excluded (singleton): jazz (palato-alveolar)

Independent factors indicate that raising in the context of velars is a universal feature.

The tongue body is high during the articulation of the velar consonants /k, g, rj/, and these

are the only consonants of English that are classiﬁed with the feature [+high] by Stevens
(1998: 254). In addition, the CV and VC transitions are slower for velars than for labials
or alveolars (Stevens 1998: 365). It follows, therefore, that the velar environment may
lead to undershoot in the articulation of a vowel, resulting in a lower Fl, especially for

non-high vowels.

98

Although apicals are not classiﬁed as [+high] by Stevens, the tongue tip is in a
high position for the articulation of the consonant, and this is correlated with a raising and
fronting effect on the transition into following front vowels. However, the transition out
of this constricted position should occur more quickly than it does with velars (Stevens
1998: 354). Despite the rapid transition time, depending on the duration of the vowel and
the place of articulation of the following consonant, the vowel trajectory may never reach
the target position. Especially with a non-high vowel such as /a=:/ is in these speakers,
undershoot may cause lower F1.

The only preceding environment that had a conditioning effect on F2 in the
present study was preceding liquids. When tested against other preceding manners, it was
signiﬁcantly correlated with backing in ﬁve speakers, particularly in comparison to
preceding voiced stops, which have already been shown to promote raising. Three of the
ﬁve speakers who Showed this effect are from Group A.

When liquids were separated from other apicals and tested against place features
for following consonant, they were found to correlate with a backed /a:/ in ten speakers,
six of whom are in Group A. This was the most widespread effect I found in my study,
but is probably due to the fact that four of the seven words used end with a velar
consonant, which further promotes backing and therefore exaggerated the results for
liquids. Since this result appears in both Group A and other speakers and has articulatory

motivation, it again suggests a universal, default tendency.

99

4.4 Conclusions

In summary, results for the conditioning effects of following consonant manner and voice
are the most striking and suggest that dramatic raising of /m/ in front of nasals is a marker
of accommodation to the NCS among Mexican American speakers of English in Lansing.
The results for preceding environment provide clear evidence in support of previous
conclusions about the conditioning effects on /a:/ of several speciﬁc consonantal
environments”. Overall ﬁndings show that preceding voiced stops, velars and apicals
promote raising of /ze/. Preceding liquids are signiﬁcantly correlated with a low F2, or
backed /$/. All of these ﬁndings except the pre-nasal raising of /ae/ agree with results
found in studies on laboratory phonology and therefore suggest universal rather than
area-speciﬁc effects.

In general, therefore, no previously unattested coarticulatory effects on the
production of /m/ are apparent in the speech of Mexican Americans in Lansing who are
native Speakers of English. However, there is evidence of complex social stratiﬁcation in
one local feature. Very low F1 in tautosyllabic pro-nasal /m/ — ubiquitous in the local
Anglo population -—- is present among those interviewed for the present study only in
women under 25 who were born in Lansing and speak English as a native language. This
supports the hypothesis that young women are the leaders of change, but it also raises the
question of whether raising in the production of /m/ before nasals is a distinctly female
marker in this group. Given the precise accommodation to NCS /ae/ found in these young

women — as evidenced by their pronunciation of both raised pre-nasal /$/ and the

 

37 The number of words used was fairly small in this study, and all possible environments
were not tested. Therefore, a lack of statistical signiﬁcance with regard to the
coarticulatory effects of any given environment does not necessarily constitute conclusive
evidence about that environment.

100

centralizing off-glide that is distinct in the pronunciation of NCS /&/ (see section 3.3.2), it
is apparent that lack of assimilation to the pronunciation of vowels other than /ae/ in these
speakers cannot be attributed to lack of contact with the Anglo community or lack of
perceptual acuity. Subtle and accurate assimilation to local mainstream norms appears to
be occurring in only some aspects of the phonetics and phonology for other reasons.
Communicative competence in Lansing’s Mexican American community clearly involves
more than just the ability to assimilate to Anglo speech characteristics. The ﬁnal chapter
in this thesis examines the potential for research in this speech community on the

interaction between ethnic identity and language use.

101

CHAPTER 5: Conclusion

5.1 Identity and Language

A three-generation pattern of language use is typical in ethnic minority communities in
the United States whose heritage language is not English. First generation residents tend
to be native speakers of the heritage language and speakers of English as a second
language. Second generation residents tend to be bilingual. And third generation
members of the community are often monolingual speakers of English (Macias 1989:
14). Since most ﬁrst generation Mexican Americans in Lansing are from Texas and
began learning English in primary school or earlier, this speech community shows an
accelerated version of this pattern. All of the ﬁrst generation respondents for this study
speak Spanish as a native language, although several also reported learning English as a
native language. Only about half of the second generation respondents report being ﬂuent
in Spanish (8 out of 15). And all six of the third generation respondents are monolingual
English speakers. The disappearance of Spanish is a common complaint among older
members of the community. Despite this loss, however, full accommodation to local
Anglo dialect norms has not occurred.

AS discussed in Chapter 1, several studies Show that children acquire the language
of their peers, not their parents (Chambers 1999, Eckert 1989). It is nevertheless the case
that speech in minority communities often differs from local mainstream norms.
Sometimes the difference is explained by the size and homogeneity of the ethnic
community, such that the ethnic group itself supplies the peer group for the children
(Fought 2003 in Los Angeles, Thomas 2001 in Texas). However, ethnic group

differences in speech have also been found in areas where — as in Lansing — the group

102

being investigated does not make up a majority of the population, leaving identity or
degree of contact as the simplest explanations of difference (Knack 1991 on a Jewish
community in Grand Rapids; Jones 2003 on African Americans in Lansing). Evidence of
the importance of identity to dialect also comes from research on other minority
populations (Evans 2001).

A further dimension is added to this puzzle by ﬁndings from studies on adults
showing that speech can change during adulthood. For example — as discussed in
Section 3.1 — Knack (1991) found evidence of accommodation to ethnic group features
by adult members of a Jewish community in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the Jewish
population made up only 4% of the total population, so that segregation from other
varieties was not a factor in accommodation. Several members of the speech community
who were native to Grand Rapids, but were 1) heavily involved in Jewish activities and

2) friends with one or more Jewish person from New York, appeared to have developed a

raised /0/ as adults. This feature is not local to Grand Rapids but was found by Labov

(1966) in Jewish speakers in New York. A major contributing factor in situations like this
appears to be ethnic pride.

Previous studies on second language acquisition and language maintenance in
immigrant communities emphasize that resistance to linguistic assimilation can be a
means by which to preserve cultural identity (Li 1982, Giles and Johnson 1987). As
pointed out by Lee (2001: 177), this generalization may be extended to include ethnically
distinct dialects of one language, as well.

Ethnic pride was readily apparent in nearly all of the respondents in the Lansing

study. In the excerpt below, Loretta, a 40-year-old, middle class woman who moved to

103

Lansing at the age of 11, proudly comments on how connected her children — ages 14
and 16 — are to their identity as Mexican Americans.

Interviewer: Do you think your kids [...] have a, sort of a sense of their,
their history and culture as Mexican Americans?

Loretta: Absolutely. They are very much into their culture and very much
have, um, can relate to their identity. And there is times when they have
to, you know, I mean they’re still learning the, you know, Mexican
American, Chicano, Latino thing, when to use that terminology, and... I’m
working with my daughter, in particular, she’s the younger one, but. My
son is just so much into his culture. He knows his language well. You

know, he knows his music well. And they both want to get into, like,
mariachi and, um...mariachi, over at, they have that at, at [a local high

school], so. Yeah.

When asked about how comfortable she feels as a Mexican American living in Lansing,
Loretta says that she feels “ﬁne, comfortable” and “[I] feel like I ﬁt in [in Lansing].” She
is not alone in this sentiment among those I interviewed — both young and old. Some
speakers even mentioned that ethnic diversity is one of the things they like about living in
Lansing and raising children there.

In the thoughts expressed by other respondents, however, ethnic pride appears to
be mixed with a sense of social isolation from the surrounding Anglo community,
especially when compared to the richly ethnic cultural life that is available in Texas cities
such as Austin and Laredo or in Mexico itself. The following excerpts are exemplary of
this attitude.

In the ﬁrst excerpt below, Melissa, a 42-year-old, working class woman who
moved to Michigan from San Antonio at the age of 10, talks about her desire to return to

Texas.

104

Umm, people are friendlier [in Texas]. Our kids love it down there...l’ve

always, I’ve always wanted to go back. Even when my daddy moved us

up here, I used to beg him to move us back (laughs) [...] It took me a long

time to say “Yes, I’m from Michigan.” I ofﬁcially still call myself a

Texan.

In the next example, Melinda, a l6-year-old, third generation, middle class speaker who
is on her way to a Big Ten university says the following when asked about being
Chicana, and if that is important to her:

Well, it is a really big part of me and people—I guess, a lot of people

don’t understand that. And, it’s kind of just like a blend, but um. . .It would

be easier to grow up around other peoples who considered themselves

Chicanos. Unlike most of the people I know. SO—yeah that would work.

But I know a great big deal of Chicanos that actually like—LIKE being

Chicano, but there are some that really ruin it.

[My family is] really involved in everything, like, Chicano. They have the

Chicano advisory committee and all that other stuff. So, we know a lot of

people. My mom grew up with a lot of people, that...So, I’m into the

group. But here and there you ﬁnd that, it’s really, you can’t really, like,

communicate with anybody ‘cause they don’t understand about it, and

there’s not a lot of Chicanos. But if we get together, there, we can...I

don’t know how to explain it.

Melinda’s pride in her heritage is mixed with a frustration that she cannot share it more
with others and that there is a disconnect between this part of her world and her
environment.

Although most of the younger respondents said that they have not experienced
much — if any — discrimination, and the older speakers reported that the situation in
Lansing has improved dramatically since they were children, several speakers did talk
brieﬂy about discrimination and prejudice, especially in school.

These comments about feeling different, wanting to move and remembering

discrimination all suggest a lack of full connection to the surrounding local community.

Even the respondents who feel comfortable with their identities as Michiganders and are

105

happy living in Lansing, may not identify with Anglo Michiganders. Evans et al (2000)
found evidence that a lack of local identity is sometimes correlated with the presence of
fewer local speech features. In this case, a lack of local Anglo identity, combined with the
desire to preserve ethnic identity, may partially explain the maintenance of a Mexican
American English that is distinct from the local Anglo standard in Lansing. Especially
within a group whose linguistic history is a crucial part of what makes it unique, it would
not be surprising for ethnic pride to manifest itself in language difference.

Detailed ethnographic research is needed to uncover more precise information
about the non-linguistic forces that are motivating the dialect of this speech community.
Such research may also uncover new social variables that are correlated with linguistic
variation. Fought (1999) emphasizes the importance of being sensitive to the institutions
and groups that deﬁne the members of a given speech community and, therefore, may
govern variation in that community. Her research on gang members in Los Angeles,
together with the work of Eckert (1989) on jocks and burnouts in a Detroit high school,
makes it clear that different social forces are at work in different populations. My two
years of ﬁeldwork in Lansing has suggested that political, religious and educational
divisions merit closer observation in the Mexican American community there, for
example.

The fact that only minimal variation was found within the members of Lansing’s
settled Mexican American community, but that signiﬁcant variation was found between
young Mexican American women and young local Anglo women suggests the existence

of a distinct speech community and a distinct variety of American English. Whether or

106

not there are aspects of this variety that are partially conditioned by the desire to preserve

ethnic identity is an important question that requires further investigation.

A summary of the conclusions reached in this thesis is provided in the following section.

5.2 Concluding Remarks

This dissertation has attempted to provide a description of the nature of four English
vowels as used in the Mexican American speech community of Lansing, Michigan. It is
apparent that some assimilation to local mainstream norms is occurring across
generations. However, assimilation is not yet complete, and the trajectory that this dialect
will take as the Mexican American community continues to grow and become more well
established is not clear.

Statistical results showed relatively little variation among respondents, indicating
that change is not occurring rapidly. With regard to the variation that was found, age is
the most Signiﬁcant factor, and /32/ is the most variable vowel. In the speech of women
under 45, /m/ is pronounced with a signiﬁcantly lower F1 (indicating a higher vowel)
than in the speech of women over 45. Furthermore, the realization of /ae/ is at the same
height in women under 45 as in a group of young Anglo women from the Detroit suburbs
who served as a control. In young women under 25, this vowel has the same F2 position
as these Anglo women, as well. These results suggest that young Mexican American
women have assimilated completely to NCS /ae/, supporting previous ﬁndings that young

women are the leaders of sound change.

107

Results for the other three vowels tested —- /0, 0, e/ — reveal a different pattern

of accommodation from that found in communities that acquired the NCS over time,
through the cascade model of diffusion by which a sound change spreads from the urban

areas where it began to progressively smaller cities and towns (Trudgill 1974, Callary

1975, Labov 2001: 285). According to this model, /a=:/ fronts and raises ﬁrst; then, /(1/

moves forward towards the spot vacated by /ze/; in the third step, /0/ moves down and

forward into the spot previously ﬁlled by /a/. Only after these three changes have

occurred does /8/ appear as lowered towards /a=:/, backed towards /A/, or somewhere in

between.

The Lansing Mexican American dialect differs in several ways. First, there is no
indication of further change in progress in any of these three vowels, since younger
Speakers are not more advanced in these shifts than older speakers. However, it is not the

case, either, that speakers have assimilated only to NCS /a=:/ and have retained Texas

speech otherwise. The pronunciations of both /8/ and /$/ appear to have been modiﬁed

dramatically in some speakers, while the other vowels remain relatively unaltered,

resulting in a different order of change than usually occurs in the NCS. More speciﬁcally,
the ﬁnding that /a=:/ and /e/ have similar or identical ﬁrst and second formant values —
though they are not merged — in ﬁrst generation residents of Lansing who arrived in
Michigan after the age of puberty indicates perceptual confusion due to dialect contact.

This result lends support to the hypothesis that order of accommodation to local norms by

a newly arrived group need not follow the previously attested pattern.

108

Results from the analysis of phonetic conditioning did not show any unexpected
patterns of coarticulation. The interesting result here was that all six young women under
25 who were native Speakers of English and born in Michigan have an /2e/ that is
dramatically raised in front of nasals. No other respondents showed signiﬁcantly raised
/ae/ in this environment. Since women under 25 were also the only group to collectively
show assimilation to both the F1 and the F2 of local Anglo /a:/, in addition to the /ae/ off-
gliding that is characteristic of the NCS, it can be concluded that this group has
accommodated fully to NCS /&/. Given that these native speakers are not also fully
accommodated to the other aspects of the local NCS dialect, perhaps the most signiﬁcant
consequence of these ﬁndings is that partial accommodation to local norms may be the

default among members of ethnic minority group speech communities.

5.3 Areas of Future Research

More research is still needed on ethnic minority speech communities. Among the
limitations of this particular study is the fact that only the NCS vowels were examined.
Many people still speak Spanish in Lansing, and in fact some only speak Spanish. It is,
therefore, expected that Spanish still plays an important role in the speech of this
community and may be reﬂected in some aspects of the phonology. The Spanish vowels
/i, u, e, o/ are monophthongs, for example, unlike these same vowels in English. Further
research on the consonants and vowels that are Similar in Spanish and English may Shed
light on the processes of second language acquisition, dialect maintenance, and substrate

inﬂuence from a heritage language.

109

Previous research has found that bilingualism has no effect on phonology in some
cases (Fought 2003) but might in others, especially if both languages are not native
languages (Flege 2003). Although many of the speakers interviewed for this study are
bilingual, this issue was not addressed because the focus was on the emerging native
speaker variety of English and the trend across generations is to lose the heritage
language.

Two more issues for future research concern perception and attitudes. DO these
speakers perceive the NCS accurately, since they are surrounded by it, despite the fact
that they do not fully show it in their own speech? And, ﬁnally, what are the attitudes of
others towards the speech of these speakers? Are they perceived as local? Is their
ethnicity still identiﬁable by others, based only on their pronunciation? If so, what are the
phonetic cues that trigger that perception? And what are the implications of these results
for phonological theory, including theories about the relationship between production and
perception?

These are only some of the areas that demand further attention. Research on
language change, in general, and ethnic minority dialects, in particular, is still in its

infancy in many ways.

110

APPENDICES

111

APPENDIX A: WORD LIST

Words used in the analysis in Chapter 3 4er prenasal /a=:/ tokens)

 

1. past 30. good 59. tin
2. cup 31. sub 60. song
3. have 32. hit 61. pause
4. body 33. pen 62. logic
5. mop 34. closet 63. tom
6. ask 35. gosh 64. dad
7. dust 36. hate 65. tab
8. hole 37. hope 66. meat
9. tip 38. duck 67. mess
10. bet 39. kid 68. Bob
11. horse 40. mesh 69. black
12. block 41. gone 70. pool
13. oil 42. rock 71. ﬁst
14. state 43. brag 72. step
15. road 44. rack 73. tall
16. pull 45. jazz 74. John
17. pig 46. bath 75. pill
18. fed 47. sleep 76. food
19. chalk 48. father 77. ﬁsh
20. awful 49. cash 78. neck
21. possible 50. mattress 79. dog
22. stop 51. boot 80. caught
23. rag 52. bun 81. doll
24. laugh 53. bend 82. Saginaw
25. toy 54. fog 83. pal
26. make 55. lost 84. pat
27. cabin 56. bead 85. apple
28. pot 57. foot 86. bite
29. has 58. puff

112

Words used in Chapter 3 Analysis (by vowel)

/ae/: apple, tab, cabin, bath, laugh, have, pat, mattress, dad, ask, past, has, jazz, pal, cash,
rack, black, brag, Saginaw, rag (N = 20)

/e/: pen. mesh, bet, mess, step, neck, bend, fed (N = 8)

/o/: mop, stop, Bob, father, pot, body, possible, John, Tom, doll, logic, gosh, rock, block
(N = 14)

/0/: awful, caught, lost, pause, closet, gone, tall, chalk, dog, fog, song (N = 11)

/A/: bun, puff, cup, sub, duck, dust (N = 6)

/1/: tin, hit, kid, tip, pig, ﬁst, ﬁsh, pill (N = 8)

Other vowels (N = 19):

boot, food, pool, good, foot, pull, hope, horse, hole, road, sleep, peel, meat, bead, hate,

state, make, toy, oil

TOTAL: N = 86

Words used in Chapter 4 Analysis (includes ge-rrasal /2_e/ tokens)

The words badge, nap, zap and mash were not included in the wordlist read by some
respondents. Therefore, they were also used only in the Chapter 4 analysis, which
analyzed each speaker individually.

/2e/: apple, tab, cabin, bath, laugh, have, gamble, Sam, pat, mattress, dad, ask, past, has,
jazz, Lansing, plant, pal, cash, rack, black, brag, Saginaw, rag, banker, badge, thank,

gang, nap, zap, mash

TOTAL: N = 31

113

APPENDIX B: INDICES OF SOCIAL STATUS
(based on Warner 1960)

Status Ranking Instructions:

Occupation:

l
2

3

6

7

Housing:

1
2
3

4
5

6
7

Neighborhood:

1

LII-bk»)

Lawyers, doctors, engineers, judges, architects, managers of large businesses
High school teachers, trained nurses, librarians, small business owners,
accountants, large farm owners

Social workers, grade school teachers, optometrists, minor ofﬁcials of business,
bank clerks, auto sales, contractors

Small business managers, stenographers, mail clerks, most store clerks, factory
foremen, private repairrnen (e.g., plumbers)

Beauticians, carpenters, plumbers, etc... (employed by others), barbers, ﬁremen,
bartenders, restaurant cooks, tenant farmers

Semi-Skilled workers, skilled worker assistants, watchmen, truck drivers,
waitpersons (in small restaurants), small tenant farmers

Heavy laborers, janitors, newspaper delivery, odd-job persons, migrant workers

Grand, ostentatious

Very good, attractive, roomy, landscaped

Good, only slightly larger than utilitarian demands, more conventional and less
showy than the ﬁrst two categories

Average, private one and a half to two story, nice lawns, some extra room, small
well-cared for lawns

Fair, just enough room for needs, well-kept up but no extras

Poor, run-down, often too small for needs, not in shambles or beyond repair
Very poor, perhaps not even designed as housing, beyond repair, crowded

Very high —- The best place to live in this area; known as the area of the
‘well-to-do’

High — An area with an excellent reputation, low crime, good schools, large
houses and yards

Above average — Not pretentious but nice, clean, tidy neighborhood
Average — Solid working class area; neat, not fancy but a nice place to live
Below average — Some run-down housing, close to industrial or other
undesirable residence areas

Low — areas regarded as ‘slums’

Very low — Tenement areas; shacks, lean-tos, ‘squatters’ areas

114

Education:

Graduate or professional school
College

High school

Some high school

Junior high school

Elementary school

Little or no schooling

NOMAWN—d

Computation: Occupation x 4 + Education x 3 + Housing x 3 + Neighborhood x 2 = Score

Ratings: 12-17 Upper
18-22 Upper-Upper Middle
23-24 Upper Middle-Upper
25-33 Upper Middle
34-37 Upper Middle-Lower Middle
38-50 Lower Middle
51-53 Lower Middle-Upper Lower
54-62 Upper Lower
63-66 Upper Lower-Lower Lower
67-69 Lower Lower-Upper Lower
70-84 Lower Lower

High school students and non-working spouses have the same scores as the principal working
member of the family (except as can be independently determined).

For this study, respondents were placed into one of only two socioeconomic status
categories, according the following scale:

17-50 Middle Class
51-70 Working Class

Speakers falling outside this range were not included in the analysis.

115

APPENDIX C: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Where were you born? How long have you lived in this area? Have you moved to
many places? (If yes) Where? How long did you stay there?

2. Where were your parents born?

3. What is your address? Do you (Does your family) rent or own a house or apartment?
How many rooms does it have? What’s your neighborhood like?

4. When did your family come to the US from Mexico? Where did they ﬁrst settle? When
did they move to Lansing?

5. Is English a native language for you? Do you speak Spanish? If yes, when do you use
Spanish and when do you use English? Do your parents speak Spanish?

6. How did you learn English? Was it hard or easy? Do you think you sound different
from other people in Lansing?

7. Do many people speak Spanish here? What’s the main problem for speakers of
Spanish in Lansing today?

8. Do you ever feel embarrassed about the way you talk? Do people ever make fun of
your accent?

9. Do kids talk differently than adults, that you’ve noticed? How do they sound? Older
people? Is there a range?

10. How old are you?
1 1. What are the names of the schools that you attended?

12. (Workers and professionals) What do you do for a living? Do you like working there?
What is your title and position?

13. Students: What do you plan to do when you ﬁnish school? Do you plan to stay here
after graduation?
Employees: What do you plan to do when you retire?

14. Network relations questions 1:
A. Do your best or closest friends live in your neighborhood? Do you go to
church? Which one? Do you have many friends from the church? Do most of
your friends go to this church?

B. Do you have any relatives who live in your neighborhood?

116

C. Do you know people who also work at your workplace from your
neighborhood?

D. Do you have co-workers of the same sex as you who live in
your neighborhood?

E. Do you spend time with your co-workers after work? How often?
15. Network relations questions 2:
What percentage of people from the following groups do you have as close friends and
associates?

A. European Americans

B. African Americans

C. Arab Americans

D. Mexican Americans
16. What do you usually do when you have spare time?
17. Is this a good place to grow up? Why or why not?
18. Have you ever wanted to live somewhere else? Why? Where?
19. What are the best and worst things about living in this area?
20. Talk about your heritage a bit. Do you feel proud to be Mexican American? What
term do you use to describe yourself? As a Mexican American, how comfortable do you
feel living in Lansing, Michigan?
21. Do you have any questions that you would like to ask concerning the interview?
Estimate of Use:
1. Listen to these three words. I will play them twice. Sometimes people pronounce
words such as man, banker and thank with a different vowel. Have you heard this
pronunciation? Does this sound normal? Do you say them this way? What percentage of

the time?

2. Do you know people (in this area) who don’t make a difference between ‘ee’ and ‘i’?
For example, they would say the words lead and lid the same way.

117

APPENDIX D: LOCATION OF RESPONDENTS’ HOME CITIES/COUNTIES IN
TEXAS AND HOME CITIES/STATES IN MEXICO

  
  
 
 

San Antonio,
Bexar County

 
 
 
 
  
 
  

Seguin,
Eagle Pass, Guadalupe County
Mavenck County
Sinton,
San Patricio County
Laredo, Webb County
Robstown,

Nueces County
Weslaco, Hidalgo County

San Benito,

Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Cameron County

Mexico

Cities further south in Mexico:
F resnillo, Zacatecas
Mexico City (Distrito Federal)

The speaker whose vowel chart is adapted in Figure 2.5 and Figure 3.6 from Thomas
(2001) is from San Antonio in Bexar County, Texas, just west of Guadalupe County

118

APPENDIX E: SUMMARY OF RESPONDENTS’ LINGUISTIC BACKGROUNDS

 

 

 

 

NES ESL OENG OENG2 OESL
Men 10 2 2 2 1
Women 6 3 2 2 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NES = born in Michigan or moved there by the age of 3; learned English as a ﬁrst
language; ﬁve of the sixteen are bilingual

ESL = born in Michigan; began learning English in primary school

OENG = not born in Michigan but moved there between the ages of 10 and 14; native

speaker of English

OENG2 = not born in Michigan but moved there between the ages of 21 and 24; began

learning English in primary school

OESL = not born in Michigan but moved there between the ages of 10 and 14, learned

English in Michigan

NES (born in Michigan, native English speaLeg) = 16 speakers, 5 bilingual

Women (under 25)
MelindaH, 16
Emelia, 20 (bilingual)
Judith, 21 (bilingual)
LucyB, 14

Solana, 22

Estela, 17

Women (25 and over)

NONE

Men (under 25)
AndyM, 14
RonaldB, 16

Men (25 and over)
Ralph, 41
Jose, 35
Edmund, 45
Walter, 71 (bilingual)
Rodolfo, 27 (bilingual)
Melito, 29
Martin, 47 (bilingual)
Jesse, 28

ESL (native to Michigan, learned English as a second language beginning in primag:

school 1
Women
SabinaH, 35
Mabel, 45

Men
Rafael, 43
Jack, 49

AnaT, 28 (reports that she does not speak Spanish now)

119

OENG (not born in Michigan, native English speaker, AOA in Michigan 14 or younger)

 

Women Men
LorettaB, 40 (M1 at 10) Laurence, 41 (M1 at 14)
Melissa, 42 (M1 at 10) Rene, 27 (M1 at 10)

OENG2 (not born in Michigan, began English with primm school, AOA in MI ages 21
2A)

Women Men
Cynthia, 39 (MI at 21) Gilberto, 54 (M1 at 24)
SimonaH, 59 (M1 at 24) Terence, 56 (M1 at 22)
OESL (not born in Michigan, learned English in Michigan)
Women Men
Lola, 19 (M1 at 10) Isaiah, 27 (M1 at 14)

Madeleine, 47 (M1 at 12)

120

APPENDIX F: PLOTS OF NORMALIZED MEAN FORMANT VALUES
FOR ALL 32 RESPONDENTS

Note: Pre-nasal /ae/ tokens are excluded from charts. Vowel charts include data from
only the words that were used in the analysis presented in Chapter 3.

121

Men’s Charts

Figure 6.1: Andy, age 14, second generation

 

200

F, (Hz)

. '3 ‘
600~»~-~~ , . . .
\
7\

800» »

 

 

 

3150 2537.5 1925

122

700

 

Figure 6.2: Ronald B, age 16, second generation

 

200

l' ‘\
1 \
r" x
.- ‘- l
9 1
-, ‘ ¢_ ...~
400. I. 1-11-111-
7" .‘7 I ’ T \
‘ I , '/ ‘

F, (Hz)
E

 

 

 

3150 2537.5 1925 13172.5 700

123

 

Figure 6.3: Isaiah, age 27, moved to Michigan from Mexico City at 14

F1 (Hz)

200

 

800-9—-

 

_.

 

 

3150

2537.5 1925
E2 (Hz)

124

1312.5

 

700

Fﬂm' . . Iﬂ

I
l

 

Figure 6.4: Rodolfo, age 27, second generation

F](Hz)

 

200

800»

 

 

 

3150

125

700

I .

 

 

Figure 6.5: Rene, age 27, moved to Michigan from Weslaco, Texas, at 10

F1 (Hz)

 

200

800-

 

 

 

3150

2537.5

1925 1312.5
F 2 (Hz)

126

 

700

Figure 6.6: Jesse, age 28, third generation

F](Ha)

200

 

800~

 

1 ,"' '7‘“ -
r'fﬁ—T 7‘ /. \
/ u I ‘ \\
l \ f l
i ,J'" I A '
r | El ,7‘\ I
f |\ .’ . ‘. . .. V».§(._._. .. .. .. 1 .. .
I t
f \~. ’
I a:
2‘ I 'l
\\ ’7
\ ‘ ‘7‘ ...-’ I / ’

 

 

3150

2537.5

1925 1312.5

127

700

Figure 6.7: Melito, age 29, third generation

 

200

 

/ 731-..N_\
\(i~ Ll... ”/2

'7‘
j .
t:
l

l 1

Fl (Hz)
,'//’- 7 7‘7 ‘
E1
1

8°“ ’ ' El:

 

 

 

3150 2537.5 19725 1312.5 700
F2 (Hz)

 

128

Figure 6.8: Jose, age 35, second generation

200

 

F, (Hz)
* 7 El

800

 

 

 

 

 

 

3150 2537.5 1925

129

700

 

Figure 6.9: Ralph, age 41 , second generation

r, (Hz)

 

800~

 

 

 

3150

2537.5

1925 1312.5 700
F2 (Hz)

130

 

Figure 6.10: Laurence, age 41, moved to Michigan from San Benito, Texas, at 4

Fl (Hz)

 

200

602--

800

 

 

 

3150

2537.5 1925
F 2 (Hz)

131

13125 700

 

 

Figure 6.11: Rafael, age 43, second generation

Fl (Hz)

 

200

800

 

 

 

 

 

3150

2537.5 1925
F2 (Hz)

132

1312.5

700

 

Figure 6.12: Edmund, age 45, second generation

20

 

Fl (Hz)
§

800

 

 

 

 

3150 2537.5 1925
F2 (Hz)

133

1312.5

700

 

Figure 6.13:

Martin, age 47, moved to Michigan ﬁ'om Sinton, Texas, at l

 

200

F, (Hz)

800

 

 

 

 

3150

1925 1312.5

F2 (Hz)

2537.5

134

700

 

 

Figure 6.14:

F, (Hz)

200

Jack, age 49, second generation

 

8005

 

 

 

 

3150

2537.5

1925
I"2 (Hz)

135

1312.5

 

700

F

 

Figure 6.15: Gilberto, age 54, born in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, Mexico; moved to south
Texas (area not speciﬁed) at 4, then to Michigan at 24

 

 

200

F, (Hz)
§

 

 

 

 

3150 2537.5 1925 1312.5 700
F2 (Hz)

136

 

Figure 6.16: Terence, age 56, moved to Michigan from Seguin, Texas, at 22

200

 

 

600- ~-

F, (Hz)

800»

 

 

 

3150 2537.5 1925 1312.5 700
F2 (Hz)

 

137

Figure 6.17: Walter, age 71, moved to Michigan from Eagle Pass, Texas, at 3

 

 

200

400 . E

 

F, (Hz)

/ \
i |\

800“ ' .‘ \W/I

 

 

 

3150 2537.5 1925 1312.5 700

138

 

 

Women’s Charts

Figure 6.18: Lucy B, age 14, second generation

 

 

5% \‘~ _- '

1
.
7 11..
. ,_—"“a1_\ .
.

F, (Hz)

 

 

 

l l r r
3150 2537.5 1925 1312.5 700

 

139

Figure 6.19: Melinda H, age 16, third generation

 

 

F, (Hz)
1
, k
a, 9
\ /
J

\ \ 7
I \
l ‘
t' ' I“
l I, / \
l I // “T I I” ".
... \ 'l b
I 1 1 ’/ \ \i .1,
l. ,' / / ' s
. . I, . . i7 1, . . ... .
800- .. ... , , @ I
v. 7 . 7
’7 \ 7/ \‘ I 7 7 ® 7" /"
1 l , t ,
l ', ‘1 1 , ’ \ J/
l \ I
| i 7 \\ 7 @ ll i
a, , 1 /,
1,. \, , /
\ / l 7‘"~—1___. -" I
\ / I l 1
x‘ 'l/ ' l l
._, ,/ ' t
I f
l i

 

 

 

3150

140

700

 

 

Figure 6.20: Estela, age 17, third generation

 

 

 

 

 

700

i
/i'-‘
l
w
I
.3
I
1312 5

 

\1/
1955
F2 (Hz)

3
2557.5

 

 

 

3150

11

E: E

141

Figure 6.21: Lola, age 19, moved to Michigan from Mexico City ath

F1(H2)

 

I
é i
, v
e E
a i
1

g i
g I
; a
g a

 

 

 

i

i 1
800.4 ._ “M-.--. ,_ --.--. H.M....-_.-_i-._ ....-M... . -.--..

i .

 

 

 

 

 

3150

142

700

 

 

Figure 6.22: Emelia, age 20, second generation

 

 

 

F1 (H2)
1
\
\\

. 2‘ r / ~
800 - ‘ MEI)

 

 

 

3150 2557.5 1925 13 {2.5 700

143 ,

 

Figure 6.23: Judith, age 21, second generation

 

 

700

- M M-_._...-..-~._.

1312.5

 

I
\
[125...]: {‘3

 

 

\
i,
/Jl
1i
//
1925

 

5.

, 7

I ..1 .I 10 1 1.. i — 0‘ i l ! i1 11,.lfif1111l: :1. (I I 3
x H // \\ 5

: /. 111 . 2

 

 

 

 

50c»-
3150

11

S: E

144

Figure 6.24: Solana T, age 22, third generation

F](Hz)

200

 

 

 

800-~-

 

 

 

 

3150

145

700

 

Figure 6.25: Ana, age 28, third generation

F1(Hz)

200

 

400,. , .-.- _ .. .. ._ .....M. .. M.-.

/r..
I

 

8001-~~-

 

i / 1 \ 1 i/" ~.\ \‘J‘
®' /’ \\
x K © 1”
\; ‘7’ 1©l
: .. _\___,_./ \\ \\-/ \\

 

 

 

 

 

3150

146

700

 

all!

Figure 6.26: Sabina H, age 35, second generation

F, (Hz)

 

 

 

 

, t /“
r \: / \
1‘ ,5 ..
\. 1 K4
\"‘~___.-'-/ ‘ I/ ‘|
.1..-‘ -
/" @T‘\\ \\
...\ ’1 'ﬁdV’“ N“\
600- 4M - A). .1” i /U\ \
ix. CD /’ \MEZM/

800+—----

 

 

 

 

 

3150

147

700

 

IE

 

Figure 6.27: Cynthia, age 39, moved to Michigan from Robstown, Texas, at 21

200

 

 

 

 

 

Fl (Hz)

--- --M .. ;. ..-. a. .1.._... ._ -1 ...—-.-..-
: i i
. l
; 1 /““~\
»—--—~- -—-~ * _— m.- 2 (C19)
. 6))” (D ‘N “——
‘~_ 1 / ”a, , K
—M_ ...... / ,, x‘ ‘\
\r—-._‘__ _ __ .. ___'__ __',.« / / \ r .\
s \ ‘
: \- . 1 )
i \-_‘~_.:. -_,..— .\ ’_
i j /
i I i \"--”l
® i
. l.‘ ,. a.
i 1

 

 

3150

 

148

 

13125 700

 

 

Figure 6.28: Loretta B, age 40, moved to Michigan from Seguin, Texas, at 10 H

200

 

 

 

 

Fl (Hz)
/
\

600-1 .-.“ ‘ ._ .. ,\

,r‘”-(—“V
/ / \_ \

E)

 

 

 

 

3150 2557.5 1925 1312.5 700
F 2 (Hz)

 

149

Figure 6.29: Melissa, age 42, moved to Michigan from San Antonio, Texas, at 10

 

 

 

 

 

.'
_ - __ M ., M..-.iﬂ. _. _ M MM .. MM--- _ M...
4007 , : 1
I 1 j
, s
x / ; ;
..— ”...—4“" ...-.4 ___. L"
.—--...M --w‘P—M ~“~‘ \
/./ \\ f/ \
7: V f )1” Cu) ‘ )
1 1 l .\
m i \\ / \\ I- : 'I ‘ /
V W -' T -.. ﬂ ..— W~~~ ...—4H,—
5 8
LL 'V'
1
r
j 1
i ,..,r-———-—,M\ :
..... 1
/ /’-‘\ N“ .\
/ ,1 \‘ \

1 T1

5 ‘\ 1 5

‘ f " 1 C5) 3 ~/’““\. :
‘- ' I

, 1

§ \\ '1‘ / ‘ i

z \

v "-

 

 

 

 

3150 2557.5 1925 1312.5 700

150

Figure 6.30: Mabel, age 45, second generation

 

 

 

 

 

 

{I

III. ,l‘

\llll.

 

 

 

E: i

 

2537.5 1925 1312.5 700
F 2 (Hz)

3150

151

Figure 6.31: Madeleine, age 47, moved to Michigan from Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico,

at 12

F1 (Hz)

ll

 

 

 

 

~’\ /
.MM..M..._...MM . . , 1 -___.._ 2 M.. ‘/T\"C“““~‘ _ M- .. V, ....--
f _ / \
1"” \\ /"“\ / \
/ ,3 \\ / i x r/ \1 g

 

 

gM/
i \V/ \ /
1
\“ ~__M/’/
1 / -\ ,/-\\
1 1' \ '-
5 ' -\ 1 f ‘.
. ® '
,. -...\ , — .7 «_ /- - ~ «m
s \«I ’
' \./ -

 

 

3150

 

152

 

700

Figure 6.32:

Simona H, age 59, moved to Michigan from Laredo, Texas, at 24

 

200

 

F](H2)
Ox
8

 

 

i
l
l
3 1
’ /\
L l I 1
1 1 ‘1.
//A\\ i m
1” \1 1| I:
l ‘ I .
: a) .
\ z E l
\ ,1" 1 ..M 5
\\\-J l- / \ i
l _ I .
't'/- 1‘ I :
- rwxwh , M - , .-
"1 5,1 1
- I t .
l

 

 

 

 

3150

153

700

REFERENCES

154

REFERENCES

Adank, Patti, Roel Smits and Roeland van Hout. 2004. “A Comparison of Vowel
Normalization Procedures for Language Variation Research.” The Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America 116, 5: 3099-3107.

Anderson, Bridget. 2002. "Dialect Leveling and /ai/ Monophthongization among African
American Detroiters." Journal of Sociolinguistics 6: 86-98.

Anderson, Bridget and Lesley Milroy. 1999. "Southern Sound Changes in the Detroit
AAVE Vowel System." Paper presented at the 28th annual conference on New
Ways of Analyzing Variation (N WAV 28).

Alvarado, Rudolph and Sonya Alvarado. 2003. Mexicans and Mexican Americans in
Michigan. Discovering the Peoples of Michigan series. East Lansing, MI:
Michigan State University Press.

Ash, Sharon. 1999. “Word List Data and the Measurement of Sound Change.” Paper

presented at the 28th annual conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation
(N WAV 28).

Baugh, John. 1984. “Chicano English: The Anguish of Deﬁnition.” In Ornstein-Galicia,
3-13.

Bailey, Guy and Natalie Maynor. 1987. “Decreolization?” Language in Society 16:
449-473.

Bayley, Robert. 1994. “Consonant Cluster Reduction in Tej ano English.” Language
Variation and Change 6, 3: 303-326.

. 1997. “Variation in Tejano English: Evidence for Variable Lexical Phonology.”
In Language Variety in the South Revisited. Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally
and Robin Sabino (eds). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 197-209.

. 1999. “Relativization Strategies in Mexican American English.” American Speech
74, 2: 115-139.

Beddor, Pamela and Sarah Hawkins. 1990. “The Inﬂuence of Spectral Prominence on
Perceived Vowel Quality.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of A merica 87,
6: 2684-2704.

Bernstein, Cynthia. 1993. “Measuring Social Causes of Phonological Variation in
Texas.” American Speech 68: 227-240.

155

Bradlow, Ann. 1995. “A Comparative Acoustic Study of English and Spanish Vowels.”
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of A merica 97, 3: 1916-1924.

Callary, Robert. 1975. “Phonological change and the development of an urban dialect in
Illinois.” Language in Society 4: 1 55-170.

Carter, Phillip. 2004. The emergence of Hispanic English in the Raleigh community: A
sociophonetic analysis. MA thesis. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina State University.

Chambers, J .K. 1992. “Dialect acquisition.” Language 68: 673-705.

. 2002. “The Ethan Experience: Native Phonology in Immigrant
Offspring.” ln Investigating Change and Variation through Dialect Contact.
Lesley Milroy (ed.). Sociolinguistics 6: 117-130.

Denning, Keith. 1989. “Convergence with Divergence: A Sound Change in Vernacular
Black English”. Language Variation and Change 1, 2: 145-167.

Deser, Toni. 1991. Dialect transmission: An analysis of vowels in six urban Detroit
families. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club.

Doran, Amanda. 2001. Language Use and Identity in a Bilingual Community: Re-
examining the English of Mexican Americans. PhD dissertation. University of
Texas-Austin.

Eckert, Penelope. 1988. “Adolescent Social Structure and the Spread of Linguistic
Change.” Language and Society 17: 183-207.

. 1989. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Identity in the High School. New
York: Teachers College Press.

Edwards, Walter. 1997. “The Variable Persistence of Southern Vernacular Sounds in the
Speech of Inner-City Black Detroiters.” In Language Variation in the South
Revisited. Cynthia Bernstein, Thomas Nunnally and Robin Sabino (eds).
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 76-86.

Evans, Betsy E. 2001. Dialect contact and the northern cities shift in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Unpublished PhD dissertation. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

Betsy Evans, Rika Ito, Jamila Jones, and Dennis R. Preston. 2000. “Change on top of
change: Social and regional accommodation to the Northern Cities Chain Shiﬁ.”
H. Bennis, H. Ryckeboer and J. Stroop (eds). De Toekomst van de
Variatielinguitiek (a special issue of Taal en Tongval to honor Dr. Jo Daan on her
ninetieth birthday), 61-86.

Fasold, Ralph. 1969. “A sociolinguistic study of the pronunciation of three vowels in
Detroit speech”. Mimeographed.

156

Feagin, Crawford. 2003. “Vowel Shifting in the Southern States.” In English in the
Southern United States. Stephen Nagle and Sara Sanders (eds). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 126-40.

F lege, James, Ian MacKay and Diane Meador. 1999. “Native Italian Speakers’ Perception
and Production of English Vowels.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America 105, 5: 2973-87.

Flege, James, Carlo Schirru and Ian MacKay. 2003. “Interaction Between the Native and
Second Language Phonetic Subsystems.” Speech Communication 40: 467-491.

F lege, James and Ian MacKay. 2004. “Perceiving Vowels in a Second Language.”
Studies in Second language Acquisition 26: 1-34.

Fox, Robert, James Flege and Murray Munro. 1995. “The Perception of English and
Spanish Vowels by Native English and Spanish listeners: A Multidimensional
Scaling Analysis.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97, 4:
2540-51.

Fought, Carmen. 1999. “A majority sound change in a minority community: /u/-fronting
in Chicano English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3,1: 5-23.

2003. Chicano English in Context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Frazer, Timothy. 1996. “Chicano English and Spanish Interference in the Midwestern
United States.” American Speech 71, 1: 72-85.

Fridland, Valerie. 2001. “The Social Dimension of the Southern Vowel Shift: Gender,
Age, and Class.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 5: 233-53.

2003. “Network Strength and the Realization of the Southern Vowel Shift Among
African Americans in Memphis, Tennessee.” American Speech 78, 1: 3-30.

Galindo, Delma Letticia. 1988. Linguistic Influence and Variation on the English of
Chicano Adolescents in Austin, Texas. PhD dissertation. University of Texas-
Austin.

Giles, Howard and Patricia Johnson. 1987. “Ethnolinguistic Identity Theory: A Social
Psychological Approach to Language Maintenance.” International Journal of the
Sociology of Language 68: 69-99.

Godinez, Manuel, Jr. 1981. “An Acoustic Study of Mexican and Brazilian Portuguese
Vowels.” Hispania 64, 4: 594-600.

157

wt, 1. .
etctczﬁv-
N

- 9'25 -.

‘H—_'ll Oder—.1 ~nv - 7 ‘ ‘ ' ' ‘
.. " “-9,; r. u ._n- w- .. 1 1 - . (u - v ...
Wﬁzalw a_-' a... '0. ..." - ~a-I H M W" , 1
. M", ‘ , '6 : "“44, 4| '¢ ‘15]: - ‘ "1 I ". I
'T 0}!) 1.60114. , ~...‘. ..1; . .. . . .51 _ ,1

-_.,.A,..1.-1.v -
...i".1,i.tlm11 ‘3' '1 nits-Q
‘.rtw-rsrcyt;.otifrf.1.§yotggtg ,
3 LI... J‘v- Isl #11 ' .I-‘ ".l c
1.'0'!‘1"O‘¢‘ 431% " IVN

V 3“ I ‘
. - 0 No no I
qua-...- ! . l
31""113090' News. .
|

p . . . ‘
0 I. .0
"-1.! a,“ a

r
"it

. v u -
Jun-v
.-'_—0.
.w .
$17:

*1

x;
:;::
-.-‘.§
'QI
'. a g-
.i7ibi
13‘: 31
..' i?
-| -:
.:;: %
...1"
1S
:‘t 0.
4'" 1;
-;¢.:
:-:
'4‘
......
“:;‘.
;‘§§
"4
.3’ié.
<.'
”If;
I's“
“I...
:t?
_"T.
.31,
as
o,‘
{v' 2

a .
353-1
1:}:

as
'3?! ‘
we
"a”
\‘C- C
.s,ii
"is .
‘51;
'3 .
is
1:.
X‘1_

' I .-'v\ ‘ r ' '0 ' . '
I J‘HJ...5~JJII' 0.. I

pk

- U' I“
.35...”

.l t .3. "'O'V
Ji'ﬁUt-t‘ﬂ'ﬂ

'
N ..
amen-«u:-

.1, J
"it.”

...‘-.1 a; l mg. "l‘4 -
. . ,~tv$
”(W-1r ‘
.. 0; no wu-

1111.1:

u 0
Hi:
m;

r t 3‘:
«11.115

'1
- t-L‘é‘

.33
an!

': ‘1“.v'r ' ill-rﬂ’ln‘SI‘NIO'
I r - I ‘11-'17 , .
.mmmmiq.

”-153

o ‘13
a .
f‘. 1 I - ' " .-

A
o,

 

. 1984. “Chicano English Phonology: Norms vs. Interference
Phenomena.” In Ornstein-Galicia, 42-48.

Godinez, Manuel, Jr. and Ian Maddieson. 1985. “Vowel Differences Between Chicano

and General Californian English?” International Journal of the Sociology of
Language 53: 43-58.

Goodheart, Jill Christine. 2004. I'm no Hoosier!: Evidence of the Northern Cities Shift in
St. Louis, Missouri. Unpublished masters thesis. East Lansing, MI: Michigan
State University.

Gonzales, Maria Dolores. 1999. “Crossing Social and Cultural Borders: The Road to
Language Hybridity.” In Speaking Chicana: Voice, Power, and Identity.
Delma Letticia Galindo and Maria Dolores Gonzalez (eds). Tucson, AZ:
University of Arizona Press, 13-38.

Gordon, Matthew. 1997. “Urban Sound Change Beyond City Limits: The Spread of the
Northern Cities Shift in Michigan”. PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan.

. 2000. “Phonological Correlates of Ethnic Identity: Evidence or Divergence?
American Speech 75,2: 115-136.

2001. Small Town Values and Big-City Vowels: A Study of the
Northern Cities Shift in Michigan. Publication of the American Dialect Society
84. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Guion, Susan, James Flege and Jonathan Loftin. 2000. “The effect of L1 use on
pronunciation in Quichua-Spanish bilinguals.” Journal of Phonetics 28: 27-42.

Gumperz, John and Stephen Levinson (eds.). 1996. Rethinking Linguistic Relativity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hagiwara, Robert. 1997. “Dialect variation and F ormant Frequency: The American
English Vowels Revisited.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of A merica
102,1: 655-658.

Hamilton, Westley. 1977. “Phonological Variations Observed in San Antonio, Texas.”
Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 2, 3-4: 83-93.

Hartford, Beverly. 1975. The English of Mexican-A merican Adolescents in Gary,
Indiana: A Sociolinguistic Description. PhD Dissertation. University of Texas-
Austin.

. 1978. “Phonological Differences in the English of Adolescent Female and Male

Mexican-Americans. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 17:
55-64.

158

 

Hazen, Kirk. 2002. “Identity and Language Variation in a Rural Community”. Language
78, 2: 240-257.

Henderson, Anita. 1995. “The short a pattern of Philadelphia among African American
speakers”. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 3,1: 127-
140. Philadelphia: Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.

Hemandez-Chavez, Eduardo, Andrew Cohen and Anthony Beltramo (eds). 1975. El
Lenguaje de los Chicanos. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Hemdobler, Robin. 1993. “Sound Change and Gender in a Working-Class Community”.
In “Heartland” English: Variation and Change in the American Midwest.
Timothy Frazer (ed.). University of Alabama Press, 137-156.

Hillenbrand, James, Laura Getty, Michael Clark and Kimberlee Wheeler. 1995.
“Acoustic Characteristics of American English Vowels.” The Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America 97, 5: 3099-3111.

Hillenbrand, James, Michael Clark and Terrance Nearey (2001). Effects of Consonant
Environment on Vowel Formant Patterns. The Journal of the Acoustical Society

of America 109, 2: 748-763.

Hinton, Leanne, Birch Moonwomon, Sue Bremner, Herb Luthin, Mary Van Clay, Jean
Lerner and Hazel Corcoran. 1987. “It’s not just the Valley Girls: A study of
California English. In Jon Aske, Natasha Beery, Laura Michaels and Hana Filip
(eds). Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics
Society. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 117-127.

Hymes, Dell. 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.

Ito, Rika. 1999. Diffusion of Urban Sound Change in Rural Michigan: A Case of the
Northern Cities Shift. Unpublished PhD dissertation. East Lansing, MI: Michigan
State University.

Jones, Jamila. 2003. African Americans in Lansing and the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.
Unpublished PhD dissertation. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

Kerswill, Paul and Ann Williams. 2000. “Creating a new town koine: Children and
language change in Milton Keynes”. Language in Society 29, 1: 65-115.

Kerswill, Paul and Susan Wright. 1990. “The Validity of Phonetic Transcription:

Limitations of a Sociolinguistic Research Tool.” Language Variation and Change
2: 255-75.

159

Kingston, J. 1991. “Integrating Articulations in the Perceptions of Vowel Height.”
Phonetica 48: 149-179.

Knack, Rebecca. 1991. “Ethnic Boundaries in Linguistic Variation.” In New Ways of
Analyzing Sound Change. Penelope Eckert (ed.). San Diego: Academic Press,
251-72.

Kuhl, Patricia. 1993. “Early Linguistic Experience and Phonetic Perception: Implications

for Theories of Developmental Speech Perception.” Journal of Phonetics 21:
125-139.

Labov, William. 1963. “The social motivation of a sound change.” Word 19:273-309.

1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC:
Center for Applied Linguistics.

1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

1990. “The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic
change.” Language Variation and Change 2:205-254.

1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 1, Internal Factors.
Language in Society 20. Oxford: Blackwell.

2001. Principles of Linguistic Change. Vol. 2, Social Factors.
Language in Society 29. Oxford: Blackwell.

Labov, William, Paul Cohen, Clarence Robbins, and John Lewis. 1968. A Study of the
Non-standard English of Negro and Puerto-Rican Speakers in New York City.
Report no. 3288. Philadelphia: US Regional Survey.

Labov, William, Malcah Yaeger and Richard Steiner. 1972. A Quantitative Study of
Sound Change in Progress. Philadelphia: US. Regional Survey.

Labov, William and Wendell Harris. 1986. “De F acto Segregation of Black and White
Vernaculars”. In Diversity and Diachrony. David Sankoff (ed.). Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 1-24.

Labov, William, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg. 2005. The Atlas of
North American English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ladefoged, Peter. 1993. A Course in Phonetics. Third Edition. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt
Brace.

160

LA NCS. Linguistic Atlas of the North-Central States. 1977. Raven McDavid, Jr. and
Richard Payne (eds.). Manuscript on Cultural Anthropology, series 38, nos. 200-
208. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Microfilm.

Lecumberri, M. Luisa Garcia and Jasone Cenoz Iragui. 1997. “L2 Perception of English
Vowels: Testing the Validity of Kuhl’s Prototypes”. Revista Alicantina de
Estudios Ingleses 10: 55-68.

Lee. Hikyoung. 2000. Korean Americans as Speakers of English: The Acquisition of
General and Regional Features. PhD Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania.

Li, Wen Lang. 1982. “The language Shift of Chinese-Americans.” International Journal
of the Sociology of Language 38: 109-124.

Majors, Tivoli. 2005. “Low Back Vowel Merger in Missouri Speech: Acoustic
Description and Explanation.” American Speech 80,2: 165-179.

Macias, Reynaldo. 1990. “Bilingualism, Language Contact, and Immigrant Languages.”
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 10: 13-25.

McDavid, Raven, Jr. 1958. “The Dialects of American English.” In The Structure of
American English. W. Nelson Francis (ed.). New York: Ronald, 480-543.

McDowell, John and Susan McRae. 1972. “Differential response of the Class and Ethnic
Components of the Austin Speech Community to Marked Phonological
Variables.” Anthropological Linguistics 14, 6: 228-239.

Mendoza-Demon, Norma. 1997. Chicano/Mexicana Identity and Linguistic Variation:
An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Gang Affiliation in an Urban High
School. PhD dissertation. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University.

. 1999. “Fighting Words: Latina Girls, Gangs, and Language
Attitudes.” In Speaking Chicana: Voice, Power, and Identity. Delma Letticia
Galindo and Maria Dolores Gonzalez (eds). Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona
Press, 39-56.

Metcalf, Allan. 1974. “The Study of California Chicano English.” International Journal
of the Sociology of Language 2: 53-58.

. 1979. Chicano English. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Milroy, James and John Harris. 1980. “When is a Merger not a Merger? The

MEAT/MATE problem in a present-day English vernacular. English World Wide
1: 199-210.

161

Milroy, Lesley. 1987 [reprint edition 1989]. Language and Social Networks. Second
Edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Moriello, Rebecca. 2003. “I’mfeeksin’ to move... Hispanic English in Siler City, North
Carolina. MA thesis. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina State University.

Myhill, John and Wendell Harris. 1986. “The Use of the Verbal —s Inﬂection in Black
English Vernacular.” In Diversity in Diachrony. David Sankoff (ed.) Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 25-32.

Newman, Michael. 2003. “New York City English.” Language Magazine (August).

Ohala, John. 1981. “The Listener as a Source of Sound Change.” In Papers ﬁom the
Parasession on Language and Behavior, Chicago Linguistic Society, May 1-2,
1981. Carrie S. Masek, Roberta A. Hendrick and Mary Frances Miller (eds).
Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Ornstein, Jacob and Paul Goodman. 1979. “Socio-Educational Correlates of Mexican-
American Bilingualism.” In Sociolinguistic Studies in Language Contact:
Methods and Cases. William Francis Mackey and Jacob Ornstein (eds). Trends in
Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 6. The Hague: Mouton, 393-421.

Omstein-Galicia, Jacob (ed). 1984 [reprint edition 1988]. Form and Function in Chicano
English. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Patrick, Peter. 2002. “The Speech
Community.” In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Chambers,

J .K., Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds). Oxford: Blackwell,
573-597.

Patrick, Peter. 2002. “The Speech Community.” In The Handbook of Language Variation
and Change. J .K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.).
Oxford: Blackwell, 573-597.

Penalosa, Fernando. I980. Chicano Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction. Long Beach,
CA: California State University.

Penfield, Joyce and Jacob Ornstein-Galicia. 1985. Chicano English: An Ethnic Contact
Dialect. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Peterson, Gordon and Harold Barney. 1952. “Control Methods Used in a Study of the
Vowels.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of A merica 24, 2: 175-184.

Plichta, Bartlomiej. 2004. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Northern Cities Chain

Shift. Unpublished PhD dissertation. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State
University.

162

 

Poplack, Shana. 1978. “Dialect acquisition among Puerto Rican bilinguals.” Language in
Society 7: 89-103.

Preston, Dennis R. 2005. “Belle’s Body Just Caught the Fit Gnat: The Perception of
Northern Cities Shifted Vowels by Local Speakers.” University of Pennsylvania
Working Papers in Linguistics 11,2: 133-46. Philadelphia: Department of
Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania.

Purnell, Thomas, Joseph Salmons and Dilara Tepeli. 2005. “German Substrate Effects
in Wisconsin English: Evidence for Final Fortition.” American Speech 80,2:
135-164.

Sankoff, Gillian. 2002 [reprint edition 2004]. “Linguistic Outcomes of Language
Contact.” In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Chambers, J .K.,
Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds). Oxford: Blackwell, 638-668.

Santa Ana, Otto. 1991. Phonetic Simplification Processes in the English of the Barrio.
PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

1993. “Chicano English and the Nature of the Chicano Language Setting.”
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 15,1: 3-35.

1996. “Sonority and Syllable Structure in Chicano English.” Language Variation
and Change 8: 63-89.

Sawyer, Janet. 1973. “Social Aspects of Bilingualism in San Antonio, Texas.” In

Varieties of Present-Day English. Bailey, Richard and Jay Robinson (eds). New
York: MacMillan, 226-233.

1975. Spanish-English Bilingualism in San Antonio, Texas. In El

Lenguaje de los Chicanos. E. Hemandez-Chavez, A. Cohen and A. Beltramo
(eds). Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 77-98. [Reprinted from G.
G. Gilbert (ed). 1970. Texas studies in Bilingualism: Spanish, French, German,

Czech, Polish, Serbian and Norwegian in the Southwest. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 18-41].

Schecter, Sandra and Robert Bayley. 2002. Language as Cultural Practice: Mexicanos
en el Norte. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Scovel, Thomas. 1995. “Differentiation, Recognition, and Identification in the

Discrimination of Foreign Accents.” In Phonological Acquisition and

Phonological Theory. John Archibald (ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 169-181.

Stevens, Kenneth. 1998. Acoustic Phonetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

163

 

Thomas, Erik. 2000. “Spectral Differences in /ai/ Offsets Conditioned by Voicing of the
Following Consonant.” Journal of Phonetics 28: 1-25.

. 2001. An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English.
Publication of the American Dialect Society 85. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.

Trudgill, Peter. 1974. “Linguistic Change and Diffusion: Description and Explanation in
Sociolinguistic Dialect Geography.” Language in Society 3: 215-246.

1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.

2004. New Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Tsuzaki, Stanley. 1971. English Inﬂuences on Mexican Spanish in Detroit. The Hague:
Mouton.

US. Bureau of the Census. 2000. Census 2000. http://www.census.gov/
(accessed August 26, 2005).

Wald, Benji. 1984. “The Status of Chicano English as a Dialect of American English.” In
Ornstein-Galicia, 14-31.

Warner, W. Lloyd. 1960. Social Class in America: A Manual of Procedure for the
Measurement of Social Status. New York: Harper.

Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov and Marvin Herzog. 1968. “Empirical Foundations for
a Theory of Language Change.” In Directions for Historical Linguistics. W.
Lehmann and Y. Malkiel (eds). Austin: University of Texas Press, 97-195.

Wolfram, Walt. 1974. A Sociolinguistic Study of Assimilation: Puerto Rican English in
New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

Wolfram, Walt, Phillip Carter, and Rebecca Moriello. 2004. “Emerging Hispanic
English: New Dialect Formation in the American South.” Journal of
Sociolinguistics 8:339-358.

Wright, J. 1986. “The Behavior of Nasalized Vowels in the Perceptual Vowel Space.” In

Experimental Phonology. John Ohala and Jeri Jaeger (eds). Orlando: Academic
Press, 45-67.

164

 

   

11111111111111111111111111111