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(Walker, 2020). Thus, the marker itself is not unique to the Southern United States, unlike previously discussed /ai/-monophthongization. However, Southerners seem to be prevoicing their stops more than non-Southerners (Jacewicz et al., 2009; Walker, 2009), and within the US South, Black speakers have a greater rate of /b/ prevoicing than white speakers, at least in some states (Herd, 2020).
Some nonunique Southern speech markers like prevoic- ing of /b, d, g/ have an older history of use in the South than others. One relatively new trend is the spread of so-called Canadian raising, which involves changes in the pronunciation of the diphthongs /au/ and /ai/ before voiceless consonants. The Canadian raising of the /au/ diphthong has been reported, for example, in the speech of younger speakers in Chalmette, LA, who were more oriented toward the greater New Orleans region than their hometown of Chalmette (Carmichael, 2020). Depending on the demographic history of the Southern subregion, this change in progress may be due to natu- ral phonetic variation or due to contact with speakers of other English dialects that feature Canadian raising. In either case, it is open to speculation what social mean- ing Canadian raising might have in the South once it is established in certain Southern populations. The documentation of this marker in the South suggests that Southern US English may be developing and adopting new speech elements serving social functions unique to Southern communities. Thus, the palette of Southern English elements may change colors but will continue to distinguish itself from other regions.
In addition to typically studied sociolinguistic factors such as age, ethnicity, class, and gender, research on Southern US English shows that community integration and rooted- ness is also a key factor determining the degree to which speakers use various Southern acoustic features (Dod- sworth and Benton, 2017; Reed, 2020). The interplay of these factors themselves may change over time, and it is challenging to build a general model of Southern speech in a demographically diverse region where involvement of different communities with different Southern speech pat- terns varies. The majority of work so far has been centered around white Southern English. More research is needed with Southern speakers who self-identify as Black, His- panic, and Asian Americans, among other groups.
What It Means to Sound Southern
Considering different elements in the Southern palette, unique and nonunique alike, that a speaker may choose to adopt in speech, what does it mean to sound Southern? Perhaps, if we wanted to voice coach an actor to pass as a Southerner for a national or international audience, we can point the trainee toward the most salient, stan- dardized features of Southern speech (see the list in The Stabilized Representation of Southern United States English; also, Thomas, 2020). Is the adoption of these elements sufficient? Such speech performance may help you sound as a stereotypical (most likely, white) South- ern American in national imagination but is likely to be critiqued as not convincing because it would not be asso- ciated with a particular subregion or community.
Nonetheless, unique and nonunique markers of Southern speech are often collectively used to establish Southernness. For example, accent features that make pop singer Brittney Spears sound Southern are illustrated in accent dissection of Spears’s speech by a blogger with undergraduate train- ing in linguistics (Karen, 2019). Highlighted markers in Spears’s speech include the notorious /ai/-monophthongi- zation, similar sounding /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ before nasal sounds (the blogger’s transcription of spend as spind), and change in the quality of /u/ (the blogger’s transcription of you, true as yew, trew). This accent dissection relies on markers of Southern speech established in research that the blogger references. This standardized Southernness is typically imagined and practiced with reference to white speakers.
Considering the intersection of geography and ethnicity, what is currently less clear is how Southerness sounds in other speaker groups from the same parts of the United States. Relatively little research has been done with Southern Black and Latinx American populations. In this previous work, Black Americans are typically com- pared with white Americans in terms of the degree of their participation in Southern vowel shift (/ai-monoph- thongization and /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ breaking) or the differentiation of /ɔ/-/ɑ/ (observe if your vowels sound the same in Don-Dawn and bot-bought word pairs; Fridland, 2003; Risdal and Kohn, 2014). For example, in western North Carolina, Black male speakers were found to exhibit the Southern vowel shift similar to white male speakers from the same area, whereas in eastern North Carolina, neither
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