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The California Vowel Shift in Santa Barbara Arianna Janoff Georgetown University

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The California Vowel Shift in Santa Barbara Arianna Janoff Georgetown University The California Vowel Shift in Santa Barbara Arianna Janoff Georgetown University Abstract The Northern California Vowel Shift was first noted by linguists in the late 1980s. The current study builds upon previous findings by investigating vowel systems in Santa Barbara. Using two reading passages, the vowel spaces of fifteen middle class, white, 20-30 year olds were examined at the midpoint of F1 and F2. The goal of this project was to determine whether the CVS is present and whether gender and other demographic variables are statistically significant. Quantitative analysis found that these speakers’ vowel systems exhibit the characteristics of front and back vowels in the CVS. Women have a lower and more backed /E/ realization than any other gender. Furthermore, women who stayed in California for college are more likely to have a complete split between pre- and non-pre-nasal /æ/ tokens. Men have /æ/ raised before /k/, which indicates that they may not have fully adopted the shift. 1 Introduction 1.1 Background The Atlas of North American English (ANAE; Labov et al. 2006) recognizes three major dialect regions: the North, the South, and the West. This is based on the three patterns within American English vowel spaces: the Northern Cities Shift, the Southern Shift, and the Low-Back Merger (Labov 1991; Labov et al. 2006). In particular, these distinctions are determined by the location of the low-front and the low-back vowels within the vowel space. The West, or “Third Dialect region”, is characterized by having a single phoneme for /O/ and /A/(Boberg 2005b). The low-back merger is not restricted to the West, but the distinctive features of other dialect regions are not found in the West. Therefore, the West is characterized by an absence of features that other regions exhibit. The characterization of the West as a single dialect region downplays the lin- guistic variability within that region, most of which has been documented during the past decade since the ANAE appeared, vastly oversimplifies the vowel spaces of an incredibly large geographic region. For example, speakers in many areas of Califor- nia participate in the California Vowel Shift (CVS), which has several distinctive elements. Eckert(2004) describes the CVS as follows: Janoff, A. 2018. The California Vowel Shift in Santa Barbara. Proceedings of the 4th Annual Linguistics Conference at UGA, The Linguistics Society at UGA: Athens, GA. 30–49. The California Vowel Shift in Santa Barbara Arianna Janoff •/ I/ fronting before nasals, backing and lowering elsewhere •/ E/ backing and lowering •/ æ/ raising to /eI/ before nasals and lowering and backing elsewhere •/ 2 U u o/ fronting •/ A/ and O/ are completely merged and raising In line with scholarship promoting the division of the “West” into smaller dialect regions (Hinton et al. 1987; Hall-Lew 2004; Aiello 2010; Kennedy & Grama 2012), I propose that California is not homogeneous with other Third Dialect regions and merits more exhaustive phonetic description. Santa Barbara was chosen as the loca- tion of this research due to its seat in the Central Coast of Southern California. The majority of linguistic research has taken place in either Northern California (Preston 1986; Hinton et al. 1987; Eckert 2004, 2008; Hall-Lew 2009, 2011; D’Onofrio et al. 2016) or the Los Angeles area (Bucholtz et al. 2007; Aiello 2010; Kennedy & Grama 2012). This leaves the more northern half of SoCal completely unexplored acoustically. 1.2 The Field Site Historically multilingual and diverse, Santa Barbara county was settled by the Chumash tribe over 13,000 years ago (Tompkins 1976). The region was explored by Spaniards in 1542, though it wasn’t settled until 1782. It was ruled by Mexico between 1822-1846, and became a part of the United States in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (Baker 2003). The city currently spans 19.5 square miles of land, not including unincorporated areas or Goleta, CA. As of the 2010 United States Census, the population is 88,410. The estimated population as of 2015 is 91,842. Santa Barbara is unique due to its $106 billion per year in tourism revenue. For its relatively small size, this means a huge amount of contact with people from all over the world. Therefore, it functions both as a melting pot and as a small town. Its location within the county and the state are highlighted in red in the map below in Figure 1. The racial breakdown from the census is provided in Figure 2. Hispanics and Latinx are considered to be White by race, though they are distinct by ethnicity. These populations were determined through a follow-up question in the census and make up 38% of the population. Non-Hispanic Whites were 52.2% (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). 31 The California Vowel Shift in Santa Barbara Arianna Janoff Figure 1 Santa Barbara County White alone 75.1% African American 1.6% Asian 3.5% American Indians and Alaskan Natives 1.0% Native Hawaiians and Pacic Islanders 0.1% Two or more races 3.9% Some Other Race 14.7% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Figure 2 City of Santa Barbara 2010 U.S. Census 1.3 Vowels in the West In Northern California, linguists have noted the presence of a vowel shift since the 1980s. Reed & Metcalf’s (1952) Linguistic Atlas of the Pacific Coast (LAPC) claimed that no phonological changes were observable in California that were specific to the area (Hinton et al. 1987: 117). By the 1980s, California English had become a stereotype through popular culture caricatures of surfers, hippies, and Hollywood, and was identifiable elsewhere in the nation (Preston 1986: 229). Based 32 The California Vowel Shift in Santa Barbara Arianna Janoff on these media parodies in movies and novels, the following traits were evident: fronting of /U/ and /u/, lowering of /I/ and /E/, and lowering and backing of /æ/. Hinton et al. compared the speech of native, young, middle-class Californians from the Bay Area to the transcriptions in the LAPC Survey (p. 118). Among speakers under the age of 30, back vowels are fronting over 70% of the time, compared to less than 30% among those born in the 1950s (p. 119). They also reported instances of /o/ fronting, which were not at all present in earlier records. With regards to the front vowel shift, Hinton et al. found both lowering of front lax vowels, and also raising of front vowels before nasals and of /E/ after velars (1987: 121). These same vowels are lowered and backed before /l/ and /ô/. The authors tie this to ethnicity and urbanity, as young middle-class Anglo urban Californians exhibit the most fronted back-vowels as well as the most lowered lax front vowels. Non-white speakers and rural speakers are more likely to have lax front-vowel raising before nasals (p. 123). The authors note that these particular elements are not exclusively Californian. Labov(1980) and Eckert(1986) report fronting of back vowels and lowering of /I/ and /E/ in Philadelphia and Detroit (p. 125). This is consistent with Labov, Yaeger & Steiner’s general principles of vowel shifts (1972): i. Lax vowels fall in chain shifts ii. Back vowels are fronted Therefore, the behavior of the front lax vowels is not unique to California, but the California Vowel Shift as a whole differs from other known vowel shifts. Eckert named the systemic Western shift the “Northern California Vowel Shift” (CVS) in 2004. Based on her examination of Chicano and Anglo adolescents in Palo Alto, CA, she characterizes the shift as a counterclockwise rotation of front and low vowels (2008: 28). She argues that this shift is a part of a larger ethnolect that is used by youth to index both ethnicity and ‘norms of coolness’ (p. 41). In particular, there is a contrast between the Anglo raising of /æ/ before nasals and the complete lack of raising in Chicano English (p. 35). Eckert found that for both Anglo and Chicano elementary schools, girls exhibit greater stylistic activity in order to signal these differences and index social power (p. 36). Linguists have traditionally credited the low-back vowel merger with starting front-vowel chain shifts (Eckert 2004). This argument has also been applied to the Canadian Shift (Kennedy & Grama 2012: 50). It follows that as /A/ retracts, /æ/ becomes more centralized, thus lowering /E/ and /I/. Kennedy & Grama argue that while this explains the Canadian Shift where the back-vowel merger is very retracted, 33 The California Vowel Shift in Santa Barbara Arianna Janoff this is not evident in California (p. 51). They found a central position for this vowel, while /æ/ is still lowered and retracted. Therefore, for California speakers the chain shift cannot necessarily be a result of /A/ retraction as not all speakers underwent this. With no new room for /æ/ to retract into, it is therefore possible that the CVS comes from a push chain started by the lowering of /I/ (p. 51). These authors thus explain the shift by asserting that /I/ and /E/ have finished moving in both men and women, but female speakers are ahead in the lowering of /æ/. They also offer that it’s possible that /æ/ was the first to retract, or that the California and Canadian shifts are the same with California speakers reacting to a much smaller degree of /A/ retraction. Finally, another hypothesis is that the back-vowel merger did initiate the change but some California speakers adopted a hybrid system where the results of the merger are present but the raising is not (p. 52). All that is clear from these theories is that more documentation is necessary to truly understand the vowel shifts in the West.
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