How Americans Speak: the Facts

Noam Chomsky: no Philly vowels (Image via Wikipedia)

If you really want to know how people use the English language in North America, you will find one consistently reliable peer-reviewed source of information, four times a year: the journal American Speech, sponsored by the American Dialect Society and published by Duke University Press.

And though it is scholarly and research based, there’s a surprising amount of information that is intelligible to anyone, even without special training in linguistics. The current editor is Thomas C. Purnell of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

American Speech covers everything from — well, just take a look at the latest issue, Volume 93, No. 2, dated May 2018.

It begins with a look at New York City’s three distinctive vowels as they declined in prestige from 1933 to 2003, as reflected in the movies from 1933 to 2003. Charles Boberg analyzes 22 films with actors who grew up in New York City and vicinity, playing New York characters.

Pronunciations in the South are next, a detailed study by Charlie Farrington, Tyler Kendall, and Valerie Fridland of what linguists call the “Southern Vowel Shift.” They find that the Southern vowels are dynamic, involving movement, as well as distinctive positions.

Moving on to the vowels of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Wil Rankinen finds UP pronunciation sounding more and more like Canadian. He notes differences between Finnish-American influenced UP dialects and those with Italian-American influences.

The main section concludes with Soohyun Kwon’s study not of a whole region but of one individual, the prominent linguist Noam Chomsky. Born and raised in Philadelphia, at age 27 Chomsky moved to Boston, where he lived for more than 50 years, leaving three distinctive Philadelphia vowels behind. Kwon compares recordings of two of Chomsky’s talks, in 1970 and 2009.

Not all of this will be immediately comprehensible to nonspecialists, but next come three articles on “teaching American speech,” aimed at bridging the gap. Charlotte Vaughn, Tyler Kendall, and Kaylynn Gunter write about a three-week lab for an introductory-linguistics course focusing on intensifiers like very, really, and super. Mark Canada suggests teaching linguistics through lexicography, in this case writing a definition for a word the student has made up. Finally, Julie S. Amberg and Deborah J. Vause tell about “a scaffolded curriculum for the introductory-linguistics class.” This included team interviews with students who do not share exactly the team members’ speech.

That’s all for this issue. Other issues include the regular feature “Among the New Words,” about neologisms; book reviews; and a “Miscellany” section of short articles. You get both print and electronic versions as part of membership in the American Dialect Society, or otherwise by subscription.