Page 50 - Fall2020

TRENDS IN SOUTHERN US ENGLISH
Black or white speakers had those distinct Southern mark- ers in their speech (Holt, 2018). This finding suggests that in some communities, Black and white speakers align in their use of patterns associated with Southern speech, and in other communities, they do not.
In addition to investigations of the degree of convergence to Southern sound trends in different populations, South- ern Black speech has to be examined in its own right. Frequently cited acoustic characteristics of Black speech in the South include changes in pronunciation of the /ɪ, ɛ, æ/ vowels called African American shift and changes in the quality of the /ɑ/ vowel (Holt, 2018). In comparison to white speakers from the same geographical area, Black speakers have been described as (1) having longer vowels before voiced consonants and (2) having more variable intonation assessed as the number of pitch accents per syllable, which may be considered ethnolect-distinguish- ing features (Holt et al., 2016; McLarty, 2018).
Even less of this type of research exists with Latinx English speech, which has been generically described as influ- enced by Spanish in characteristics of vowels, consonants, and rhythm (see an overview in Thomas, 2020). We can speculate that Southern Latinx speakers, similar to other minority groups, may or may not use features associated with Southern white speech, depending on a particular geographical location, speaker orientation, and overall community integration. In white imagination, however, Latinx residents of the South are not likely to be South- erners and sound as Southerners. Figure 4 illustrates folk dialect awareness in two Southern college-aged white speakers from Northern Louisiana who were asked to “outline and label different speech areas of the United States” following the methodology developed by Preston (1986, and his later work). In these informants’ percep- tion of different accents spoken across the United States, Latinx American English speech is not Southern. The highlighted area was labeled “general country southern” by the female informant in the upper portion of Figure 4 and as a combination of “Southern”-“messy Southern”-“mixed Southern” by the male informant in the lower portion of Figure 4. Notice that to the left of the highlighted area in each map, a “lots of Spanglish” and “Mexican” regions were outlined, suggesting that the informants do not perceive Latinx speech in these areas as Southern.
Recognition of Southern Talkers by Listeners
Given what we know about the distribution of Southern speech markers across different populations and the rela- tively recent changes in their use, it is not surprising that the perception of a Southern accent is more stereotyped (and homogeneous) than warranted by actual subregional variation in the production of unique and nonunique markers of Southern speech (Kendall and Fridland, 2012). The occurrence of these standardized features of Southern speech do not seem to provide a local dialect advantage to Southern listeners, at least in tasks such as multiple- choice vowel identification (Jacewicz and Fox, 2020) or free-response dialect identification (Alcorn et al., 2020). That is, everyday experience with a dialect may not make listeners more subconsciously or consciously aware of the
Figure 4. Dialect regions in the United States hand drawn by two white college-aged informants (color added for regions labeled by them as Southern).
50 Acoustics Today • Fall 2020