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whose cultural identity has favored isolation and small-town values. The vowel system in the Inland South is affected by the Southern Shift, a distinct set of changes whose traces can be found across the whole American South. However, the features of Southern Shift are particularly robust in the In- land South and even more so in the speech of older speakers (listen to North Carolina speech, Demonstrations 1 and 3, at http://goo.gl/bOFDWw). These two contrasting speech communities, the large metropolitan Inland North and the smaller and relatively detached Inland South, provide two examples of adherence to different regional cultural patterns that underlie both the divergence of AE dialects in today’s society and the survival of regional accents in the face of pop- ulation mobility, television, and multicultural influences.
Sound Change
The divergent trends in AE dialects are in part due to the operation of distinct chain shifts in regional vowel systems (such as the NCS or the Southern Shift) that have stimu- lated audible changes in pronunciation patterns across gen- erations of speakers and, to a large extent, predict further development of regional dialects. In the English language, sound changes of this kind have been known for centuries and documented by historical phonologists in descriptive terms. The most famous example of such diachronic sound change is the English Great Vowel Shift, which was a radi- cal sound change affecting the English vowel system during the 15th to 18th centuries (Stockwell, 1978). Although the primary evidence for the diachronic change comes from his- torical scripts, it is the state-of-the-art of the acoustic analy- sis that enables progress in documenting sound change. The precision of acoustic measurements prevents misinterpreta- tions and inaccurate assumptions. Also, knowledge of typi- cal acoustic variation is essential to execute more system- atic control in selecting speech materials for recordings and analysis, which has significant implications for a better un- derstanding of sound change.
Ideally, sound change in a speech community ought to be studied in “real time,” that is, longitudinally over a num- ber of years, but there is an obvious difficulty in obtaining speech data from the same individuals repeatedly over sev- eral decades. A notable exception is an analysis of the annual Christmas broadcasts of Queen Elizabeth II over a 50-year period (Harrington, 2006). These broadcasts contain the Queen’s annual addresses to Britain and the Commonwealth read in a similar style. A careful acoustic analysis revealed changes in the pronunciation of some of the Queen’s vowels.
Possibly, these changes reflect the Queen’s adoption of cer- tain features of a mainstream pronunciation and certainly are not associated with any specific geographic region. The acoustic exploration of the Queen’s pronunciation patterns over time has a unique value and is an excellent example of a real-time study, even if it does not provide insights into sound change in a particular speech community. Admitted- ly, the eminent Queen’s accent (also known as the Queen’s English) represents upper-crust received pronunciation of British English (Wells, 1982), a nonlocalized variety spo- ken by a relatively small number of individuals belonging to the highest social class. The speeches can be found on the official website of the British Monarchy. The first televised broadcast was delivered in 1957 (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mBRP-o6Q85s) and the latest in 2015 (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Mzor6Hf1tY).
To overcome the difficulties in obtaining longitudinal data, acoustic analyses of sound changes have been carried out in “apparent time,” that is, cross-sectional. In those studies, the pronunciations of younger and older speakers were com- pared and any changes were interpreted as sound change in the community over the period corresponding to the age dif- ference between the two generations. Such cross-generation- al comparisons provide sufficient evidence of sound change if the speakers have resided in their communities for most of their lives (Labov, 1994; Sankoff, 2005). A more recent example of an apparent-time study is a large-scale investiga- tion of sound change in three distinct AE speech communi- ties in southeastern Wisconsin, central Ohio, and western North Carolina (Jacewicz et al., 2011a). Using a common experimental protocol, speech samples were obtained from three generations: grandparents (66-91 years old), parents (35-51 years old), and children (8-12 years old). Acoustic analysis revealed robust changes in the pronunciation of vowels across the generations, providing new evidence and improved understanding of the most current sound changes that each speech community is undergoing (listen to Dem- onstration 1 at http://goo.gl/bOFDWw).
Acoustic Measurements in Characterizing Regional Vowel Systems A more systematic use of acoustic analysis for studying vow- el production in sociolinguistic context was introduced in early 1970s when sociolinguist William Labov and his team at the University of Pennsylvania first utilized vowel for- mant measurements to characterize regional vowel variation (Labov et al., 1972). However, over the next three decades,
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