Drawl

Abstract: Introduction Within the United States of America, the South clearly is a region which is distinct in many ways – historically, culturally, and also linguistically. The dialect spoken in the southern United States differs from the type of American English spoken elsewhere; it is a variety which most Americans can identify, and towards which strong attitudes prevail, as Preston (1996) has shown. Much has been written about Southern English (cf. the monumental bibliography by McMillan and Montgomery 1989, and recent collections such as Montgomery and Bailey 1986 and Bernstein, Nunnally, and Sabino 1997), and with Lee Pederson's Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States an extremely rich documentation is available that will keep analysts busy for decades to come (cf. Montgomery's thorough and competent discussion of this source, 1993a). In contrast, relatively little is known about the historical roots and the evolution of this dialect. Some general assumptions and statements have been brought forward, but to a considerable extent these have remained unsupported by linguistic documentation: a history of Southern English remains to be written. In fact, this state of affairs is by no means typical only of Southern English; as Montgomery (1996b) points out, virtually no serious, text-based research has been carried out on colonial American English in general.

Abstract: Formant contours contain essential perceptual cues for vowel discrimination and distinguish ethnolectal and regional varieties that show superficial alignment in steady-state measures (Hillenbrand et al. 1995, Jacewicz et al. 2011). The analysis of contour information allows for more fine-grained investigation of dialectal differences in effects of coarticulation and duration. Additionally, it obviates arbitrary selection of measurement landmarks under traditional static F1/F2 analyses. Although acoustic vowel analysis of static F1/F2 values are foundational to sociolinguistic analysis and dialectology, vowel trajectories remain neglected despite their value in these domains (Koops 2010b, Scanlon and Wassink 2010, Thomas 2002:pg. 172). Our study uses functional data analysis of multiple formant measurements across the duration of each vowel to examine variation in Southern English of Piedmont, North Carolina. We show that differences in vowel formant trajectories are a key marker of participation in regional sound systems and ethnolectal vowel variation, illustrating the effectiveness of using functional data analysis to incorporate trajectory information into traditional sociolinguistic analyses. Our research investigates dialectal differences in front lax vowel contours among speakers of Southern varieties of African American and European American English (AAE and EAE respectively) in Piedmont, North Carolina (see Figure 1) using speech from sociolinguistic interviews. The diphthongization of the front lax vowels is a primary component of the Southern drawl thus serving as the perceptually salient cue of interest when looking at European American speakers in Raleigh. The Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) is receding in Raleigh, NC, leading to generational differences (Dodsworth and Kohn 2012). Among older speakers who participate in the SVS the front lax vowels BIT, BET, and BAT can be raised and subject to Southern breaking or diphthongization (e.g., [ae] becomes [aej@]) while these vowels are lowered and monophthongal among younger European Americans in the region. In contrast, the African American Vowel System (AAVS) has remained relatively stable for significant portions of the 20th century in this region (Kohn 2013). Among speakers who participate in the AAVS, front lax vowels are raised, in superficial alignment with SVS patterns; yet their vowel trajectories are distinct from European American raised variants. Generally speaking, these systems differ in that Southern EAE vowels are more subject to breaking resulting in greater diphthongization than AAE vowels (Holt 2011, Koops 2010a, Risdal and Kohn 2013). Although front lax vowel height of the AAVS and SVS are similar according to static F1 measurements, formant trajectories are a central component of linguistic diversity in the region. This comparison illustrates that analyses of formant trajectories capture sources of variation that may be missed by more common static measures employed in sociolinguistic analysis. From a methodological standpoint, we believe that functional data analysis as a method for comparing aspects of curve-shaped data improves upon traditional formant analyses for a number of reasons. First, it does not require pre-defined landmarks for measurement, e.g., at a certain proportion of the vowel or a maxima/minima. Static analyses can be problematic as methods for comparing dialectal differences in F1/F2 values using measurements at fixed landmarks, for example Euclidean distances, are impacted by such a priori decisions. Instead, functional data analysis allows for more holistic descriptions and contrasts to be made using measurements of intrinsically smooth vowel trajectories. This approach eliminates the need to make a priori decisions about which section of the

Abstract: Introduction Speculations, conjectures, and hypotheses on the genetic relationship between African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) and American White Southern English (AWSE) date from the colonial period. Travelers to the American colonies often observed that blacks and whites spoke alike. Some of them even conjectured that the then emergent AWSE was influenced by its AAVE counterpart. As late as the 1990s, this view was still reflected by linguists such as Feagin (1997), who attributes to AAVE influence the southern drawl, non-rhoticism (or r -lessness), and falsetto pitch (apparent musicality). The similarities between AAVE and AWSE are real. Non-Southerners have even often remarked that they were unable to determine whether a speaker was black or white unless they saw them. There is as yet no consensus on whether these ethnic varieties are so similar because the (descendants of) Africans influenced the speech of the (descendants of) Europeans up to the late nineteenth century or because of other reasons. I argue below, on sociohistorical grounds, that while AWSE and AAVE have undoubtedly influenced each other, their commonalities can be explained primarily by their common, coextensive histories of over 200 years during which their speakers interacted regularly with one another. Many of today's differences between the two vernaculars can be attributed to the divergence that resulted from the widespread institutionalization of segregation in the late nineteenth century. It has also often been observed that an English koine developed in the American colonies, which is the ancestor of at least today's American English vernaculars.