We are currently drafting plans for Stage 2 of a three-stage project. Within Stage
2, acoustic phonetic analysis will be brought to bear on consonant and vowel variation
for native Appalachians. The research will focus on socially relevant variations
in modern Appalachia, including the Southern Vowel Shift, several vowel mergers,
and two sets of consonant variation. The primary goal for the overall project is
to conduct quantitative sociolinguistic analysis on English in WV to determine
its current status, including its regional affiliations, its relative degree of
vernacularity, its sociolinguistic divisions, and its directions of change. From
the research accomplished to date, it is clear that many of the traditional features
of English in Appalachia are fading from WV, although some remain under the radar
of social awareness. The most finely-grained and socially important language variation
patterns in modern Appalachia are the ongoing changes to vowel systems, but the
social and linguistic patterns of those systems have not been well documented.
Another facet of this research is the examination of rural America. Rural areas
in the United States are changing, and the sociolinguistic patterns discovered
in this project will illustrate those changes. As WV is one of the most rural regions,
an account of the current state of synchronic variation allows for an empirical
assessment of (sub)urban/rural divides on sociolinguistic variation.
Stage 2 involves acoustic phonetic analysis in order to enhance the description of
language variation in the WV region of Appalachia and to enhance the basic dialect
description provided in the Atlas of North American English. Specifically, the
extent and progression of the Southern Shift will be assessed: How complete is
the shift in the southern half of the state? Geographically, how far north and
into what rural areas does the Southern Shift stretch? In preparation for Stage
3 of this project, do rural areas demonstrate more advanced characteristics of
the Southern Shift? Along with the Southern Shift, vowel mergers play an increasingly
common part in the future of WV English, and their trajectory of change will be
acoustically assessed by this project. The front-lax merger spreads from the South,
and the low-back merger is originally from western PA, but the two mergers largely
overlap in WV. Additionally for Stage 2, two consonantal variables will be analyzed:
the merger of /hw/ ~ /w/, a current change in progress, is contrasted with θ~f
(e.g. birfday), a more stable sociolinguistic marker.