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current dialect-specific features. Both Southerners and non-Southerners are not particularly accurate in identify- ing the Southern US dialect compared with other dialects of North American English (Alcorn et al., 2020).
This finding is surprising because Southern speech argu- ably has been standardized and stereotyped the most among the US dialects. Perhaps this is a result of dis- tributional changes in markers of Southern speech. In addition, the perception of Southernness may be deter- mined by a broader range of speech characteristics (in vowels, consonants, intonation, rhythm) than the ones reported most frequently. For example, Gunter et al. (2020) found that when Western listeners rated to what degree words containing a range of vowels sounded Southern, words with vowels other than those implicated into the Southern vowel shift received higher Southern- ness ratings. These results do not conform to the previous research on South-defining sound features.
Evolution of Southern Speech
Southern speech communities continue to evolve. The demographic is changing, the standardized Southern features of the 20th century become less common, new speech elements with a potential to have a unique function in the South emerge, and the awareness of within-region differences is on the rise. Current sociophonetic research on Southern US English is valuable because it describes variation in sound patterns more accurately than research on Standard American English. It identifies and analyzes linguistic features of targeted and underrepresented speech communities, with particular attention to the historical time frame. This research also generates diverse, non- mainstream data that highlight theoretical questions in speech acoustics that otherwise would not be addressed and that facilitates practical applications of research find- ings in areas such as education, forensics, and artificial intelligence. Last but not least, sociophonetic research on Southern speech can broadly impact society because it can promote an understanding of, and respect for, accents and language diversity, serving to counteract linguistic profil- ing and stigmatization. This line of research is necessary for embracing diversity in public and academic spaces and for developing implicit bias training to improve the social climate and trust.
Future Research
Future acoustic research on the perception and produc- tion of Southern varieties of US English should consider a range of socio-indexical acoustic parameters, wider than has been studied previously. Researchers should strive to recruit diverse participant groups to better understand social variation within different regions of the South. Similar to work on understudied languages, work on dialects has urgency. Southern US English may be endan- gered or at least undergoing significant changes due to the socioeconomic development, influence of the media, and Standard-English-only educational systems. Some of its most iconic and salient features (e.g., Southern drawl or breaking, /ai/-monophthongization) are receding. We hope that sociophonetic research in the US South will stimulate the use of articulatory-acoustic data to address larger theoretical and methodological issues in the fields of speech acoustics and communication.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the editor of Acoustics Today, Arthur Popper, for his thoughtful suggestions on this manuscript. Our deep appreciation goes to our colleague from the Uni- versity of Alabama, Paul Reed, for his spirited recordings of the majority of audio examples for this article, in both Southern (specifically, Appalachian) English and Stan- dard American English. This article was inspired by many decades of research on Southern English and by The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America special issue (2020) on this English variety.
References
Alcorn, S., Meemann, K., Clopper, C. G., and Smiljanic, R. (2020). Acoustic cues and linguistic experience as factors in regional dialect classification. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 147, 657-670. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0000551.
Boersma, P., and Weenink, D. (2019). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Com- puter, version 6.0.50 . Available at http://www.praat.org. Accessed May 15, 2020.
Carmichael, K. (2020). The rise of Canadian Raising of /au/ in New Orleans English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 147, 554-567. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0000553.
Dodsworth, R., and Benton, R. A. (2017). Social network cohesion and the retreat from Southern vowels in Raleigh. Language in Society 46, 371-405. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404517000185.
Dodsworth, R., and Kohn, M. (2012). Urban rejection of the vernacular: The SVS undone. Language Variation and Change 24, 221-245.
Fridland, V. (2001). Social factors in the Southern Shift: Gender, age and class. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5, 233-253.
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