Page 45 - Fall2020

Figure 1. Segmented waveform and spectrogram displays of the word "buy" produced by two female speakers from the state of Louisiana (see Multimedia2 at acousticstoday.org/shportmm) and analyzed in Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2019). Highlighted parts of the waveforms delimit the voice onset time (VOT) of the consonant /b/; yellow lines represent the first (F1) and the second (F2) formants of the vowel /ai/. a: Southern-like pronunciation with a long-lag VOT of a prevoiced /b/ and little change in F1/F2 when /ai/ is produced as a monophthong [aː]. b: Standard pronunciation with a short-lag VOT of an unaspirated /b/ and a diversion in F1/ F2 when /ai/ is produced as a diphthong [ai]. The [aː]-like pronunciation of /ai/ is a unique marker quickly recognized as Southern. The prevoiced pronunciation of /b/ is not unique to Southern speech but is associated with it subconsciously.
complex of two or more vowels, such that sit may sound like see it and set like say it (examples are from Labov et al., 2006). Similar to /ai/-monoph- thongization, vowel breaking has also served as a hallmark of Southern speech.
(3) Changes in the quality of vowels /u/ and /ʊ/, such that room may sound like rum or rim and dude as deed.
(4) Changes in some consonant pronunciations where, for example, LSU sounds like Al a shoe, strong
as shtrong, and buzz as bus before pauses (also compare the highlighted difference in two pronun- ciations of /b/ in Figure 1).
(5) Differences in the quality and distribution of pitch accents (which are the elements of intonation contributing to perceived melodicity of Southern speech) as compared with other North American English dialects.
These and other relatively standardized Southern pho- netic variants have been examined in dozens of acoustic studies, using recordings of words, reading passages, and interviews. The methods for acoustic analyses of rel- evant speech segments continue to develop, capturing nuances in their articulatory and acoustic characteristics. One of the most prominent contributions of research on Southern speech to the field of speech acoustics is the development of several new methods to analyze English vowels, which are great in number (compared with an average vowel inventory in world languages) and have several pronunciation variants associated with different English-speaking communities. Many Southern vowels change quality in the course of pronouncing words (i.e., vowel breaking), and new methods allow captur- ing this dynamicity that may be a fruitful approach to understanding vowels in other English dialects, in other languages, and in language learning processes.
The hallmark elements of Southern speech exemplified above have been fixed in the nation’s image of the South, and they keep being exploited to establish Southernness in speech. Southern US English is imagined to be homo- geneous and monolithic by outsiders, peppered with quintessential Southern markers such as y’all (you in Stan- dard English), bless your heart (the idiom is explained at bit.ly/2Xj7UcJ), the pronunciation of /ai/ as a long [aː], and the stretching and breaking of vowels, hence the notori- ous Southern drawl among other perceived pronunciation characteristics. This is despite the fact that Southern Eng- lish has been spoken in an extensive region, covering 2 time zones and 15 states, and in close contact with other languages historically spoken in these territories (Native American languages such as Cherokee and Choctaw and colonizers’ languages such as Spanish and French; Picone and Davies, 2015), where further variation in English is undoubtedly noticeable even to the untrained ear.
Southerners may also perpetuate this myth for media and tourist consumption, as evident in locally published folk
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