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Acoustics of Regionally Accented Speech
acoustic studies have been conducted in North America. However, regional variation has become a fertile field not only in the remaining parts of the English-speaking world including the British Isles (Ferragne and Pellegrino, 2010), Canada (Boberg, 2005), Australia (Cox, 2006), and New Zealand (Watson et al., 2000) but is also emerging in lan- guages and geographic regions worldwide. The growing interest is reflected in presentations at international con- ferences including the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, INTERSPEECH, the Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon), and ASA meetings. Journal-length papers have also begun to document acoustics of regional variation in languages such as Dutch (Adank et al., 2007) and French (Schwab and Avanzi, 2015). The complexity of dialects in China, including subdialects of Mandarin, has been explored in MA theses and PhD dissertations around the globe, such as Li (2015) who used several acoustic met- rics to examine rhythm patterns in 21 Chinese dialects.
The Concept of Speech Community
The central tenet of sociolinguistics is that the linguistic be- havior of individual speakers cannot be understood without knowledge of the larger group, the speech community, to which they belong (Labov, 2001). Research in regional varia- tion is thus concerned with the extent to which individu- als conform to pronunciation patterns in their own speech community. There are different kinds of communities be- cause each community is a group of people who uniquely share a specific pattern of language use that determines its size and location. For example, a speech community can be geographically defined and be relatively small (such as the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts) so that the pro- nunciation patterns may be viewed as a marker of local iden- tity (Labov, 1963). A different kind of speech community has often been found in larger cities. Such communities consist of social networks or “ties” between individuals who speak a common variety to show their solidarity with one another and maintain group identity. For example, a study of Belfast English found that the local dialect features were preserved in individuals participating in dense networks (who shared the same social contacts) and interacted in multiple social contexts, whereas weak ties and loose networks stimulated the reduction of distinctive local accents, favoring standard- ization (Milroy, 1980).
In the United States, speech communities can be very large. The dominant pronunciation patterns in these major geo- graphic regions spanning several states became the primary focus of acoustic analysis. The first and most comprehensive 32 | Acoustics Today | Summer 2016
Figure 1. Map of the six major dialect regions in the United States.
overview of the major regional variants (or dialects) of Eng- lish spoken in North America was provided in the Atlas of North American English (ANAE), based on the acoustic anal- ysis of 439 speakers recorded in the years 1992-1999 (Labov et al., 2006). Using a sociolinguistic sampling procedure by means of telephone interviews, the ANAE identified six broad dialect regions shown in Figure 1: North, Midland, South, West, New England, and Mid-Atlantic. Within these major varieties, there are also dialect regions identified on the basis of more specific variables such as vowel changes (known as shifts, mergers, and splits). In fact, the ANAE is predominantly a study of the pronunciation of vowels be- cause it is primarily the vowels that differentiate regional variants in AE.
A particularly striking vowel pronunciation pattern has been found in large metropolitan areas around the Great Lakes in the North, extending from southeastern Wisconsin (Madi- son, Milwaukee, Kenosha) to northern Illinois (Chicago, Peoria), northern Ohio (Cleveland, Toledo), Michigan (De- troit, Grant Rapids), and New York State (Syracuse, Roch- ester, Buffalo). This large region with a population of about 34 million people constitutes a relatively uniform speech community known as the Inland North. The core feature of the dialect of the Inland North is a series of vowel pronunciation changes termed the northern cities shift (NCS; listen to Wiscon- sin speech, Demonstrations 1 and 3, at http://goo.gl/bOFDWw).
In sharp opposition to the Inland North is the Inland South, a much smaller community in the South whose regional ac- cent has a particularly high concentration of core Southern features. The Inland South is a mountainous Appalachian region that includes parts of Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, whose homogeneity originates in its settlement history dating back to the 18th century. The region was populated primarily by Scotch-Irish migrants