The State of California Vowels

Home , Back vowel, Fronting (sound change), Raising (sound change)

Background Methods The CVS: (1) the lowering of the front lax vowels Cory Holland University of California, Davis Data Collection: Because the goal of this study was to collect data from as wide a (2) the fronting of TRAP before nasals Shifting or Shifted? The state of California vowels geographical distribution as possible, data were collected using several recruitment methods: (1) (3) the fronting of GOOSE and FOOT and the centralization of GOAT in person from a diverse pool of undergraduate and graduate students and department staff at (4) the merger of back vowels before /l/ the university (2) by email from academic, professional and social networks. Those participants (5) the merger of LOT and THOUGHT and the backing of the resulting vowel not contacted in person were instructed to record the reading passage in their home in .wav (6) fronting of STRUT format, if possible, and to make the recording in a place with minimal background noise, and

F2 (Hz) F2 (Hz) 2400 2200 2000 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 2200 2100 2000 1900 1800 1700 1600 1500 1400 1300 1200 1100 read the passage with natural feeling speed and intonation. (1) Front lax vowel lowering: Reports are somewhat mixed, but recent reports have KIT and DRESS 300 350 1. Retracting of front lax vowels 3. Fronting of back vowels 4. Merger of back vowels before /l/ Reading Passages: A total of 6872 tokens from “The Boy who cried wolf” (Deterding, 2006) lowering, when not pre-/n/ to the point that KIT is even in height with FACE. Retraction of TRAP is very 350 duke 400 ● For most Californians GOOSE, FOOT and GOAT are fronted, as goose('s) and “Comma gets a Cure,” (McCullough, Somerville, & Honorof, 2000) were analyzed. advanced in southern California (more for women than for men), with all but the one older speaker 400 zoo should tune could 450 two who lm(fd.goat.foot ~ age) retracting TRAP behind the 1875 Hz benchmark for retraction set in the ANAE (Kennedy & Grama, 2012). 450 compared to their pre-/l/ counterparts. And, as found elsewhere, would ● Front lax vowels by sex GOOSE you sex FLEECE: Comma: disease, either, even, fleece, immediately, see, GOOSE: Comma: Duke, cool, goose, goose's, lunatic, rule, In a linear regression with Speaker as a random factor, sex, region and ethnicity soon lunaticlooking Multiple R-squared: 0.1086, Adjusted R-squared: 0.09374 F2 (Hz) GOOSE-L 500 Earlier work just had DRESS raising after velars and KIT, DRESS and TRAP raising before nasals and 500 good f street, treatment Wolf: even, feast, sheep stool, tune, who, you, zoo Wolf: afternoon, soon, two, zoo, fool ) ) GOOSE is the most fronted and GOAT the least. noon z z H 2600 2400 2200 2000 1800 1600 1400 H ( (

as fixed factors and age as a covarient the following factors had a statistically m Positive numbers indicate that FOOT-L F1 is lower

FOOT 1 F-statistic: 7.31 on 1 and 60 DF, p-value: 0.008909 1 F FOOT-L F ● lowering and backing before /l/ and /r/ (Hinton et al., 1987). 550 KIT: Comma: administered, been, convinced, different, district, give, FOOT: Comma: could, foot, full, put, should, woman, wool, 400 GOAT-L None of the social factors under consideration were found to affect stroking 550 significant effect (p<0.001): so overcoming than GOOSE-L F1, meaning that FOOT-L is above put woman itchy, kit, millionaire, official, opinion, picked, singing, six, skin would Wolf: foot, good, looking, full (2) Raising of TRAP before /n/: TRAP is found to be raising before nasals, but not velars or in other 600 diagnosisfoot GOAT participants' degree of fronting. go ● 600 Wolf: chicken, convinced, did, fist, this, trick, village, villagers KIT – ethnicity (f2) 500 FOOT goat GOOSE-L in the vowel space, the configuration KIT 650 ● contexts, in California(Kennedy & Grama, 2012). Raising of TRAP before nasals is reported to be FOOT-L ● KIT FOOT has a much larger front to back spread (see left), which appears note GOAT home(s) FACE: Comma: ate, bathe, daily, face, made, name, paying, plain, GOAT: Comma: bowl, diagnosis, goat, hold, home, note, old, DRESS – sex (f1), ethnicity (f2), region (f2) GOAT-L owner 650 reflected on the graphs below conditioned by ethnicity, with raising occurring for white, but not Chicano, fifth- graders (Eckert, 2008). 700 0

GOOSE 0

● 600 GOOSE-L to be caused by token/phonetic environment (see right), more 2 take, waiting Wolf: gave, later, raising, safety, stayed owner, so (x2), stroking Wolf: go, homes, overcoming, so, told (3) Back Vowels – Fronting and Merging: Back vowel fronting is a common feature of many dialects of TRAP – sex (f2) 750 700 ● investigation is needed. DRESS: Comma: checked, dress, effective, efforts, expect, expensive, STRUT: Comma: beautiful, because, come, cup, much, rubbed, ) DRESS z

English, both in North America (Boberg, 2008; Fridland & Bartlett, 2006; Fridland, 2009; Hall-Lew, 2004; For each of the three front lax vowels women have a backer and/or lower vowel, H (

700

1 gently, headed, herself, kept, letter, measure, medicine, mess, strut, suffering, up Wolf: company, cousins, duck, much,

DRESS F t 0 Thomas, 1989; Ward, 2003) and Great Britain (Harrington, Kleber, & Reubold, 2008; Harrington, 2007) o remembered, sentimental, stressed, tell, then, vet, veterinary Wolf: rushed, up, wolf on average, than men. 0 o f 1 . t

● TRAPTRAP 800 Pillai score of vowel compared to its pre-/l/ counterpart – higher scores indicate more separation, hence, more fronting: a shepherd, get, however, pleasure, successful, threaten, next, himself, and is one of the early salient features of the CVS (Hinton et al., 1987). In most recent accounts the shift For DRESS SoCal speakers have a lower vowel and Central Valley speakers have GOAT is the only vowel that o g . d

0 again 0 0 . . . 1 uu u u 1 1 of GOOSE is reported to be very advanced (Kennedy & Grama, 2012), possibly completed (Hall-Lew, GOOSE FOOT GOAT uu u u u uu u u ʊ ʊ ʊ ʊ o o shows movement in apparent Negative numbers indicate that GOAT-L F1 is a fronter vowel u u u u u u ʊʊʊ ʊ ʊ ʊ o 900 u u ʊ ʊʊ ʊ ʊ o o uu u u ʊʊ ʊʊ ʊ ʊ ʊ ʊ o o o o TRAP: Comma: animal, back, bath, began, can’t, happy, imagine, THOUGHT*/LOT: Comma: calling, cloth, coffee*, Comma (x2), 8 u 8 ʊ 8 . . u u . ʊ ʊ ʊ o 2011), while GOAT is still in motion, moving forward for younger speakers. ● 0 uu u 0 ʊʊʊ 0 o o uuu u u u ʊʊ ʊ ʊ o oo o 0 lower than FOOT-L F1, meaning that GOAT-L is For DRESS and KIT – in both pre-/n/ and non-pre-/n/ contexts – white speakers f uu u u ʊʊ ʊ ʊ ʊ ʊ oo o time, suggesting a change in Avg. 0.817 0.774 0.583 u u u u ʊ ʊ ʊ oo o jacket, managed, practice, relaxing, that, trap, unsanitary Wolf: cost, dog, got, job, long, odd, office, palm, strong, talk*, m u u u ʊ ʊ ʊ ʊ oo o 6 u 6 6 o o . . (4) Merger of back vowels before /l/: Before /l/, the back vowels are phonetically conditioned to . o 0 u 0 ʊ ʊ 0 o 1000 u u ʊ o o o o o progress. Younger speakers above FOOT-L in the vowel space actually, after, afternoon, exactly, have, had, began, plan, ran thought*, walk*, washed, water* Wolf: thought*, bother, flock, E T ʊ ʊ T o o

have a backer vowel (lower f2) than all non-white speakers (p<0.001).See S o A u u O oo O o O

O o O F ʊ G remain in the back of the vowel space and are often used as an indication of the back periphery of a std.dev 0.151 0.145 0.231 G u ʊ o o 4 4 ʊ 4 o o o . . . ʊ shot, watch, hot, not

0 0 ʊ 0 o o boxplot and chart below. u o o o front GOAT more than older o 0 speaker's vowel space (Fridland, 2009; Hall-Lew, 2011). There are several reports of back vowels merging o o 0 2 2 2 . . . slope 0.0008 0.0027 -0.005 o 1 0 0 0 o o speakers, however the - o Analysis & Normalization: For each sound file: (1) those not already in .wav format were before /l/ in California: Gordon (2008) and Guenter (2000) report a merger of GOOSE ~ FOOT before /l/. KIT and DRESS by ethnicity o o 0 0 0 . . . R^2 -0.014 0.023 0.041 0 0 0 correlation with age is very 20 30 40 50 Vowels (f) Vowels (m) converted using VLC sound editing software (2) the edges of each vowel (excluding on- and off- Guenter suggests that STRUT ~ GOAT also merge before /l/. Thomas (2001) also reports that his speaker F2 (Hz) 20 30 40 50 20 30 40 50 20 30 40 50 0

0 2600 2400 2200 2000 1800 1600 1400 age age age F2 (Hz) F2 (Hz)

0 weak.

3 p 0.666 0.126 0.041 1400 1200 1000 800 600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 glides) was hand annotated in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2012) as a Text Grid (3) the duration of from Northern California has merged GOAT and STRUT before /l/. 400 age 350 350 (5) Low Vowels – backing and merger: LOT and THOUGHT were found to be moving toward merger in 450 each vowel segment, and the first, second and third formant at three time points (1/3, 1/2 and 2/3 0 the late 1980's (Hinton et al., 1987) with THOUGHT lowering towards LOT, except in the case of a 0 kit 500 of the marked duration of the vowel) were measured using a script (4) F1 and F2 were normalized 5 kit 400 400 2 kit-n following /l/. Most studies investigating vowels in southern California agree that THOUGHT and LOT are kit-n 550 With Speaker as a random factor the using the NORM online vowel normalization suite (Thomas and Kendall 2007), using the Labov

) For younger speakers, 450 450 merged, with the resulting vowel occupying a low-back unrounded position (Godinez & Maddieson, 1985; z 600 H 0

( difference between the three back vowels Atlas of North American English (ANAE) method and grand mean (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006).

0 ) GOOSE-L

z GOOSE-L 2 0 primarily f

H ( 2 Hagiwara, 2006; Kennedy & Grama, 2012). However, in Northern California Eckert finds the THOUGHT ~ 650 1 ) 500 ) 500 F dress-n GOOSE, GOAT and FOOT before /l/ does z z H H ( (

dress younger women, LOT vowel merged and moving back and up into the space occupied by THOUGHT and Hall-Lew (2009) dress 700 1 1 Statistics: All statistical analysis and graphing was done in the R statistical environment dress-n FOOT-L F FOOT-L F not reach statistical significance: 550 550 0 GOAT-L is GOAT-L finds a significant interaction with age for the extent of the merger in San Francisco. 0 750 (R Core Team, 2014). Analyses include: Analysis of Variance (aov), Tukey tests for honestly 5 GOAT-L 1 800 moving up in (6) Fronting of STRUT: The movement of STRUT is the least mentioned feature of the CVS, but is 600 600 significant differences (TukeyHSD), goodness of fit (lm), and linear regression using Rbrul (Ezra aov(f1~vowel+Error(Speaker)) the vowel space. interesting in the current data. Hinton et al mention, but don't investigate the fronting of STRUT. The nW 850 0 W Johnson, 2014). Vowel charts were created using ggplot2 (Wickham, 2009) and phonR (McCloy, 0 650 650 0 900 Error: Speaker (p= 0.12) advancement of STRUT to a position just above TRAP is also mentioned by (Hagiwara, 1997) 1 2013), other graphs and charts were created using the car package (Fox, 2014). nW.dress W.dress nW.dress-n W.dress-n nW.kit W.kit nW.kit-n W.kit-n Error: Within (p<2e-16) 700 700

Ethnicity and Vowel

Participants Conclusions 2. Raising/fronting of TRAP before /n/ 5. THOUGHT/LOT merger Bay Area: 16 F / 5 M Age: 18-56 L1: English (15), Cantonese/English (2), aov(f1/f2~THOUGHT/LOT+recording (1) the lowering of the front lax vowels ● English/Tamil, Japanese, Spanish,Tagalog, Northern Central Valley lm(pillai.trap ~ age) ● The raising and/or fronting of TRAP before /n/ is +sex+ethnicity+region+bilingual+ THOUGHT and LOT are merged for all speakers. Speaker sex, ethnicity and region all condition the expression of the front lax vowels. Women, who gender ● Vietnamese f Multiple R-squared: 0.157, Adjusted R-squared: 0.1429 Error(Speaker) Southern California speakers have a backer THOUGHT/LOT than both the m correlated with age, with younger speakers more are generally thought to lead vowel changes, do have lower/backer average values for all three F-statistic: 11.17 on 1 and 60 DF, p-value: 0.001435 f1 (p=) f2 (p=)

0 Bay Area and Central Valley speakers. Bilingual L2: Spanish (6), Italian . likely to have a larger separation between the two vowels. However, there is no indication of a change in apparent time, suggesting that the vowels 1 THOUGHT/LOT 0.368 0.143 ● Percentage Bilingual: 67% groups (see left) Although there appears to be some height difference between THOUGHT are not currently in motion. Interestingly, in post hoc tests white speakers had significantly 8 . 0 Normalized vowels for 62 speakers. Each point represents a single speaker's mean value, ellipses recording 0.437 0.267 ● It appears that choice of reading passage (see and LOT for Bay Area and SoCal speakers (see graph to lower left), when different F2 values for KIT and DRESS as compared to all non-white speakers. Far East Bay encompass one standard deviation (calculated from combined speaker means). 6 . sex 0.758 0.088 looking at each token plotted individually it appears that this difference p 0

a bottom left) has a significant effect on Pillai score, (2) the fronting of TRAP before nasals r t . i a

l ethnicity 0.258 0.137 l

i may be the result of lower and fronter LOT before /t/. More investigation 4 p

. however, looking at the tokens (bottom right), it While all speakers raise/front TRAP before /n/, the effect of age is significant, with younger 0 seems like the effect should be the opposite, as 6. STRUT region 0.808 0.009 is needed. speakers having a wider gap between the two token groups. 2 . 0 several of the Comma tokens appear to be much bilingual 0.334 0.247 (3) the fronting of GOOSE and FOOT and the centralization of GOAT

0 THOUGHT v. LOT by Region THOUGHT v. LOT by token .

0 closer to the pre-nasal group. More investigation is GOOSE and FOOT both front, with no age effects and no conditioning factors. GOAT is the least F2 (Hz) F2 (Hz) 20 30 40 50 Men have a higher STRUT San Francisco/ needed. 1700 1600 1500 1400 1300 1200 1100 1000 1550 1500 1450 1400 1350 1300 1250 1200 fronted, and fronting does correlate with age. age vowel than women (p<0.05) East Bay Southern Central Valley 650 water 780 (4) the merger of back vowels before /l/ BayArea LOT watch calling recording Vowels by recording CentralValley THOUGHT Taking across speaker variation into account all three back vowels (GOOSE, FOOT, GOAT) are both botherlong b SoCal 700 c comma F2 (Hz) dog 800 wwolf merged before /l/. For younger women GOAT before /l/ appears to be moving up in the vowel 2100 2000 1900 1800 1700 1600 1500 washed 0 . 1 c 650 walk space, suggesting movement towards a tighter merger. c 750 thought cloth Central Valley: 11 F / 16 M Age: 18-56 flocks 820

8 unsanitary cost . c bbb began palm (5) the merger of LOT and THOUGHT and the backing of the resulting vowel. 0 b c c w strong L1: English (19), Spanish (5), German & English, c bc b b managedplan 700 w 800 talk ) c c c ) z c b w ran THOUGHT z THOUGHT and LOT are merged for all speakers, and while some speakers appear to have a H H 6 b w THOUGHT ( . animal ( N c can't Assyrian, Vietnamese 840 0 c p 1 c c THOUGHT 1

a w 750 LOT F r F t LOTLOT job distinction between the two, in most cases the direction of the distinction is not prototypical, with . odd i

a w that l 850

South Bay Bilingual L2: Spanish (4) l i b

w ) 4 w comma p

. w b w z 0 w coffeeoffice b H THOUGHT either below or in front of LOT. The resulting merged vowel is low and back in the b ( w 800 860 Percentage Bilingual: 44% ww w imagine had 1 b w w F wc practice 900 2 shot vowel space, and region is significant, SoCal speakers have a backer vowel. . w w have 0 ww w w jacket w w w exactly relaxing 850 In the Central Valley Hispanic speakers have a higher and fronter STRUT vowel than white or got (6) STRUT Southern California: w w w w actually afternoon 880 0 . 950 0 w back happy trap Asian speakers. No differences by ethnicity exist in the other regions. not STRUT is located centrally in the vowel space, without fronting to the extent reported by Hagiwara 8 F / 6 M Age: 18-37 20 30 40 50 bathafter 900 wolf age hot (1997). One interesting difference to emerge is that Hispanic participants from the southern L1: English(10), English/Spanish, comma 1000 900 950 Central Valley all have a higher fronter realization from both Hispanics from other regions, and Spanish(2), Hebrew non-Hispanics from the same region. Bilingual L2: Spanish(3), French The effects of social factors: Percentage Bilingual: 57% Boberg, C. (2008). Regional Phonetic Differentiation in Standard Canadian English. Journal of English Linguistics, 36(2), 129–154. Godinez, M., & Maddieson, I. (1985). Vowel differences between Chicano and General Californian English? International Journal of the Sociology Hall-Lew, L. (2011). The Completion of a Sound Change in California English. In Proceedings of the 17 th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVII) McCloy, D. (2013). phonR: R tools from phoneticians and phonologists (Version 0.4-2). Retrieved from Age- Correlates with the fronting of GOAT and the raising of TRAP before /n/ Totals: 62 (36 F / 26 M) Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2012). Praat: doing phonetics by computer (Version 5.3.04). of Language, 1985(53). (pp. 807–810). Hong Kong. https://github.com/drammock/phonR Sex- Women back/lower the front lax vowels more than men and men have a higher STRUT vowel Deterding, D. (2006). The North Wind versus a Wolf: short texts for the description and measurement of English pronunciation. Journal Gordon, M. (2008). The West and Midwest: phonology. In The Americas and the Caribbean (Vol. 2). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Harrington, J. (2007). Evidence for a relationship between synchronic variability and diachronic change in the Queen’s annual Christmas broadcasts. In J. Cole & McCullough, J., Somerville, B., & Honorof, D. (2000). Comma gets a cure. A Diagnostic Passage for Accent Study. Age: 18-56 (avg: 27, sd=10) than women. of the International Phonetic Association, 36(02), 187. Guenter, J. (2000). What is English /l/ Really? In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session J. I. Hualde (Eds.), Laboratory phonology (Vol. 9, pp. 125–144). Walter de Gruyter. R Core Team. (2014). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from Ethnicity: Asian (10), Hispanic Eckert, P. (2008). Where do ethnolects stop? International Journal of Bilingualism, 12(1-2), 25–42. and Parasession on Aspect. University of California, Berkeley: eLanguage. Harrington, J., Kleber, F., & Reubold, U. (2008). Compensation for coarticulation, /u/-fronting, and sound change in standard southern British: An acoustic and http://www.R-project.org Region- SoCal speakers back the merged THOUGHT/LOT more than speakers from other regions. (9), Mixed (6), White (37) Ezra Johnson, D. (2014). Rbrul (Version 2.22). Retrieved from http://www.danielezrajohnson.com/Rbrul.R Hagiwara, R. (1997). Dialect variation and formant frequency: The American English vowels revisited. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of perceptual study. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123(5), 2825–2835. Thomas, E. (1989). The implications of/o/fronting in Wilmington, North Carolina. American Speech, 64(4), 327–333. Ethnicity- Hispanic speakers, but only those from the southern Central Valley, raise and front Fox, J. (2014). car: Companion to Applied Regression (Version 2.0-20). America, 102(1), 655. Hinton, L., Moonwomon, B., Bremner, S., Luthin, H., Van Clay, M., Lerner, J., & Corcoran, H. (1987). It’s Not Just the Valley Girls: A Study of California English. Thomas, E. (2001). An acoustic analysis of vowel variation in New World English. [Durham, NC]: Published by Duke University Press for the Percentage Bilingual: 55% Fridland, V. (2009). Patterns of /uw/, /ʊ/, AND /ow/ Fronting in Reno, Nevada. American Speech, 83(4), 432–454. Hagiwara, R. (2006). Vowel Production in Winnipeg. The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La Revue Canadienne de Linguistique, 51(2), 127–141. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 13, 117–128. American Dialect Society. STRUT. White speakers back KIT and DRESS more than all other speakers. (Spanish/English 36% Other 19%) Fridland, V., & Bartlett, K. (2006). The social and linguistic conditioning of back vowel fronting across ethnic groups in Memphis, Hall-Lew, L. (2004). The Western vowel shift in northern Arizona. Manuscript, Stanford University. Kennedy, R., & Grama, J. (2012). Chain Shifting and Centralization in California Vowels: An Acoustic Analysis. American Speech, 87(1), 39–56. Ward, M. (2003). Portland Dialect Study: The Fronting of/ow, u, uw/in Portland, Oregon (Masters Thesis). Portland State University. Bilingual- Whether or not a participant was bilingual was included in the analysis, but did not Labov, W., Ash, S., & Boberg, C. (2006). The atlas of North American English phonetics, phonology and sound change ; a multimedia reference tool. Berlin Wickham, H. (2009). ggplot2: elegant graphics for data analysis. Springer. Tennessee. English Language and Linguistics, 10(1), 1–22 Hall-Lew, L. (2009). Ethnicity and phonetic variation in a San Francisco neighborhood (Dissertation). Stanford University. reach significance for any vowel.