“Our Southern is Different than Southern Southern”: Geographic Perceptions of Southern and Northern US English Dialect features in New Orleans English
| dc.contributor | D'Onofrio, Annette | |
| dc.contributor.author | Carmichael, Katie | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-09-28T21:59:35Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-09-28T21:59:35Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 2023 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2023-09-28 | |
| dc.description.abstract | While some regional US dialects are enregistered at a national level, such as those associated with New York City or the American South (e.g. Hartley & Preston 1999), some locally enregistered dialects stay below the level of pan-US awareness, e.g. Pittsburghese (cf Johnstone 2009). New Orleans English (NOE) provides a unique example of such a locally enregistered variety, as it contains a combination of features shared with New York City English (NYCE) (Carmichael & Becker 2018) and those linked with the US South (Carmichael 2014). This Northern-Southern combination of features can present an indexical quandary for non-local listeners, who must reconcile competing geographic meanings present within the same speech stream. In this study, we present two matched-guise experiments that examined how non-local US listeners geographically classify NOE speakers. Specifically, we examined how NOE speakers' use of features associated with the Northeast (e.g. /r/-lessness, the MARRY vowel) and the South (alveolar -ing, /ai/-monophthongization) impact how listeners place these speakers. We find that NOE speakers were variably classified as from the NYC area or the South, depending on which features of their dialect were encountered. This difference held across listeners from the NYC tri-state area and those from the US South. However, when combinations of these enregistered features were presented within a single speech stream, participants were most likely to hear the speaker as from the Northeast, even when South-linked features were also present in the signal. While NOE constitutes a combination of features formed through bricolage, listeners unfamiliar with the dialect appear to make speaker location judgments based on specific salient features, in this case, those linked with NYCE. This suggests that dialect identification is affected by both listener experience and the indexical weight of particular place-linked features. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/58889 | |
| dc.publisher | University of Pennsylvania | |
| dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject | Linguistics | |
| dc.subject.other | Sociolinguistics | |
| dc.title | “Our Southern is Different than Southern Southern”: Geographic Perceptions of Southern and Northern US English Dialect features in New Orleans English | |
| dc.type | Working Paper | |
| dspace.entity.type | Publication | |
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| relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery | 3ef22458-3fd6-4679-b557-be24cf235631 | |
| relation.isJournalIssueOfPublication | e02b470d-91d0-4a2c-88c5-61965e8c1684 | |
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| relation.isJournalOfPublication | 132fd3ed-455d-4af6-9c2c-a7ed87eee405 | |
| upenn.schoolDepartmentCenter | School of Arts & Sciences::Department of Linguistics::University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics |