Page 44 - Fall2020

FEATURED ARTICLE
Sounding Southern: Identities Expressed Through Language1
Irina Shport and Wendy Herd 2
“Where are you from?” is the question one often hears in the United States. Many English speakers from the South- ern United States can hardly avoid this question (similar to speakers of English as a second language) unless they become bidialectal and learn to switch between a Southern accent and a more mainstream, Standard American accent, as many Southerners nowadays do (to compare South- ern and Standard pronunciation of a bidialectal speaker, listen to Multimedia1 at acousticstoday.org/shportmm). Southern US English stands out among North American English dialects as being talked about and stigmatized the most, similar to English spoken in New York City (Pres- ton, 1988). It is often portrayed in the media and public as having a Southern drawl, twang, nasal, or sing-song qual- ity to it. These labels serve to stereotype Southern speech and cast evaluative judgments on its speakers, although a lay person would hesitate to explain what twang is or why drawl is associated with low education. Sociophoneticians have studied Southern US English to better understand acoustic characteristics that make this English variety unique, social variables that influence the use of these characteristics in speech, and the social fabric of language attitudes. The work with Southern speech contributes not only to English dialectology but also to theoretical and applied speech acoustics and sociolinguistics.12
In this article, first we discuss frequently cited character- istics of Southern US English, followed by a discussion of recent research that lends much more nuance to what it means to sound Southern nowadays. We end by syn- thesizing this work and discussing its importance to the field of speech communication and to society. Our goal is to provide context for understanding the acoustic descriptions of Southern US English, the methodological
1 This article derives from a special issue of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America edited by Irina Shport and Wendy Herd (see bit.ly/3f0TqEs).
2 We regret to share that Dr. Wendy Herd passed away on August 11, 2020.
innovations necessary to understand them, and the inter- play of sociolinguistic variables in identity expression through language. Elements typical to Southern speech are used selectively and creatively by individual Southern speakers rather than as a stereotypical bundle that some are accustomed to see in descriptions of Southern speech.
The Stabilized Representation of Southern United States English Comprehensive overviews and synthesis of acoustic research on Southern US English can be found in works such as the Atlas of North American English (ANAE; Labov et al., 2006) and the special issue on Southern US English of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Shport and Herd, 2020; Thomas, 2020). Figure 1 represents a typical approach in an examination of (Southern) speech, where recordings are digitized, annotated, and acoustic measurements for speech segments under investigation are extracted for further statistical analyses.
Based on decades of research, pronunciation that is readily associated with English spoken by white Southern speakers includes the following features (listen to example words at Multimedia3 at acousticstoday.org/shportmm).
(1) Monophthongization in the /ai/, /oi/, and /au/ diph- thongs. This is the pronunciation of these two-part segments with less inherent vowel quality change, roughly speaking, as a long first part of a segment, so that my may sound as ma and boil as bole. Of these, /ai/-monophthongization has been a hallmark of Southern speech for many decades, pronounced as a long [aː] before voiced consonants and word- finally, so that hi, my bride may sound as ha, ma bra (compare the quality of the /ai/ vowels in Figure 1).
(2) Changes in the quality (formant trajectories) and quantity (duration) of vowels /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ in words like sit, did, set, dead, sat, dad (two words per vowel, respectively). These changes often involve vowel breaking when a vowel segment sounds like a
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44 Acoustics Today • Fall 2020 | Volume 16, issue 3
https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2020.16.3.44