R‐Lessness in Post‐Katrina Greater New Orleans

Journal of Sociolinguistics 21/5, 2017: 696–719

Displacement and local linguistic practices: R-lessness in post-Katrina Greater New Orleans1

Katie Carmichael Virginia Tech, Virginia, U.S.A

Variable r-lessness in New Orleans English is a salient linguistic feature tied to local place-based identity. In this study, I examine rates of r-lessness in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which caused large-scale displacement in the region. Participants come from the linguistically conservative suburb of Chalmette, where r-lessness is more robust than in New Orleans proper. Participants’ connections to Chalmette were measured in two ways: (1) post-Katrina location status, i.e. whether participants returned or relocated after the storm; (2) place orientation, captured via an ethnographically informed, multifaceted measure of stance and exposure to places outside of Chalmette. Analysis revealed that place orientation better predicts rates of r-lessness than post-Katrina location. I argue that the marked quality of r-lessness makes it available for identity-driven use to express a connection to Chalmette. This study demonstrates one way to account for the linguistic implications of individuals’ shifting allegiances to places they live(d).

KEYWORDS: Sociolinguistic variation, place, identity, mobility, displacement, New Orleans English, r-lessness

1. INTRODUCTION Place has long been cited as an explanatory factor for linguistic variation. For instance, research in variationist sociolinguistics and dialect geography has demonstrated how language use across locales can reveal information about settlement patterns, contact, and sociopolitical developments. Likewise, certain regional linguistic variants can tie a speaker to a locale, echoing that place’s particular history and development. But individual places may have contested identities, resulting in varied views on what it means to be ‘from’ there (Modan 2007; Becker 2009). Moreover, speakers may have ties to more than one place, as the global population becomes increasingly mobile in contrast with the targeted NORMs (Non-Mobile Older Rural Males) of early dialectological research (Chambers and Trudgill 1998). As sociolinguists work to improve our

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd R-LESSNESS IN POST-KATRINA NEW ORLEANS 697 models of variation in situations of movement across dialect areas, factors relating to place orientation must be considered. In this study, I employ ethnographic and variationist sociolinguistic methods to examine a white, working-class dialect in Greater New Orleans (GNO). The linguistically conservative GNO suburb where this dialect is spoken, Chalmette, has seen large-scale displacement and reorganization since Hurricane Katrina devastated the region in 2005. To better understand the effects of this movement on linguistic features tied to place, I analyzed the speech of both individuals who returned following the storm (returners), and those who relocated to a different dialect area within GNO (relocators). Here, I report on linguistic data from 57 speakers, examining their rates of r-lessness, or variable absence of post-vocalic /ɹ/. Results demonstrate that overall, (r) patterning cannot be predicted by whether speakers returned or relocated following the storm. It is, however, predicted by a multi-faceted measure of place orientation, developed based on local insights after nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in the area. I propose, in conclusion, that sociolinguists consider including more complex measures of place orientation in models of variation. Engaging more deeply with speakers’ orientation to the places they live(d) would make our models better able to account not only for situations of displacement, but also for situations of immigration, gentrification, and globalization that have formed the focus of much recent sociolinguistic inquiry (e.g. Shin 2012; Newlin-Łukowicz 2015; Sharma and Rampton 2015). As the field has developed more flexible ways of measuring and analyzing identity factors like gender/sexuality (Kiesling 2008; Zimman, Davis and Raclaw 2014) and ethnicity (Benor 2010; Nagy, Chociej and Hoffman 2014), this paper builds upon others (e.g. Johnstone 2004; Becker 2009; Reed 2016) providing evidence that including nuanced treatment of place orientation as an identity factor in models of sociolinguistic variation can similarly improve our ability to account for the variation observed.

1.1 Place and displacement in sociolinguistic research Several foundational variationist studies focus on place in terms of orientation towards local versus extra-local norms. Labov (1972 [1963]) found that Martha’s Vineyard residents producing the highest rates of diphthong centralization were long-term residents that either lived in isolated parts of the island or expressed a strong desire to stay on the island. Milroy’s (1980) analysis of working-class neighborhoods in Belfast demonstrated that speakers with denser social networks – those who interacted with the same groups of people across different spheres – tended to adhere more closely to local linguistic norms. Finally, in Detroit, Eckert (2000) examined high schoolers she dubbed ‘jocks’ and ‘burnouts’ based on participation in school activities and desire to stay within the Detroit area. While jocks attended more to extra- local linguistic norms, burnouts featured higher rates of local Northern City

Shift features, indicating each group’s orientation towards local linguistic norms. More recent research has noted the crucial role of not only local orientation, but also place identity, in linguistic expression. Johnstone’s work on Pittsburghese has shown that, as linguistic features become enregistered and tied to a given place (e.g. Pittsburgh), they become available for performance and commodiﬁcation, to demonstrate that a given individual aligns themselves with popular notions of being ‘from’ that place (Johnstone, Bhasin and Wittkofski 2002; Johnstone 2009). Of course, not all individuals from a given place agree on what it means to be ‘from there’. Such conﬂicts about the identity of a locale can impact the linguistic strategies speakers use to construct a sense of place while challenging others’ ideas of their homeplace (cf. Mt. Pleasant in Washington, D.C. [Modan 2007]; the Lower East Side of Manhattan [Becker 2009]). In circumstances of displacement and migration, speakers’ relationships with places can become especially highlighted (Cotter and Horesh 2015). Sometimes these relationships are framed in terms of ethnic identity, especially in the case of immigration and diaspora (Hoffman and Walker 2010; Nagy, Chociej and Hoffman 2014; Newlin-Łukowicz 2015). However, in such contexts ethnicity, heritage, and homeland can become so closely intertwined as to be indistinguishable. Most research on displacement and migration is focused on situations where speakers cross oceans or political borders, facing integration into a new community with an unfamiliar culture and tongue (e.g. Schleef, Meyerhoff and Clark 2011; Sharma and Sankaran 2011). These sorts of L2 immigration contexts are fundamentally different from movement across dialectal boundaries within the same country, as issues of intelligibility and citizenship render these contexts hyper-salient for migrant and recipient community alike. For this reason, examination of movement on a smaller scale – across dialect boundaries but not national boundaries, for example – can provide a clearer picture of the subtle ways speakers exploit connections between places and their associated linguistic features. Geographic mobility in and of itself – even if speakers do not permanently relocate across dialect boundaries – has been shown to impact both linguistic production (Meyerhoff and Walker 2007; Urbatsch 2015) and perception (Clopper and Pisoni 2004). Moreover, the very existence of mobile speakers may highlight the ties between certain linguistic features and the places they are most commonly used, providing the opportunity for speakers to agentively produce variants that express orientation to one place or another (Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006; Hazen and Hamilton 2008; Barnes 2016). In second dialect acquisition research, linguistic factors are often the primary focus, and social factors, if included, are typically limited to time spent in different dialect areas, or occasionally social networks (Nycz 2015). Such approaches do not account for personal agency in adhering to linguistic patterns tied to an identity a speaker values – such as being ‘from’ their

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd R-LESSNESS IN POST-KATRINA NEW ORLEANS 699 original dialect area, or being an ‘honorary member’ of their new dialect area. Degree of integration into the linguistic norms of a new location has indeed been shown to be dependent on intangibles, such as: • desire to return to the homeland (Drummond 2012); • development of positive relationships with individuals in the new speech community (Lybeck 2002); and • awareness of certain linguistic features being tied to social capital (Solomon 1999; Meyerhoff and Walker 2007; Hazen and Hamilton 2008; Cho 2012). Thus, a number of extralinguistic factors influence one’s orientation towards homeplace versus new terrains, and also the ways those ties are expressed linguistically. A goal in this study was to capture relevant factors that contribute to participants’ place orientation and to create a measurable scale of (extra-)local orientation that could be included in statistical analyses of variation. Quantifying one’s orientation to certain locales is no trivial task, but similar indices for ethnic orientation have been successfully operationalized in the past. Hoffman and associates found that Toronto immigrants’ answers to an ethnic orientation questionnaire correlated with use of certain L2 features and participation in regional sound changes (Hoffman and Walker 2010; Nagy, Chociej and Hoffman 2014). Fix (2014) and Newlin-Łukowicz (2015) used ethnographic insights to score participants according to their orientation to African American and Polish ethnic identities, respectively, finding that participation in regional sound changes differed for speakers who scored at different ends of the orientation spectra. Though less established than ethnic orientation indices, there have also been attempts at developing multifaceted indices of place orientation. Solomon (1999) used insights from ethnographic fieldwork in Valladolıd, Mexico, to quantify orientation to urban and rural locales; the index proved predictive of /y/ realization in Spanish. In his examination of Appalachian English in Tennessee, Reed (2016) used a rootedness metric borrowed from sociological place- attachment questionnaires (Williams and Vaske 2003) designed to assess speakers’ physical and emotional ties to their hometown, finding that rootedness scores predicted the variation observed better than traditional variables such as socio-economic status or social network. The development of extra-Chalmatian orientation scores, described in detail below, uses ethnographic insights about speakers’ physical and emotional ties to their pre-Katrina home of Chalmette, quantifying place orientation in relation to social and linguistic factors that existed in the population before the storm.

2. GREATER NEW ORLEANS: SOCIOHISTORICAL CONTEXT AND ETHNOGRAPHIC INSIGHTS New Orleans was established as a French colonial outpost in the late 1600s, but has had diverse inﬂuences since then – African inﬂuences as a result of

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 700 CARMICHAEL the slave trade, and Irish, Italian, and German influences due to the immigration of dockworkers. These latter European immigrant groups created a distinct socio-cultural group, referred to as ‘Yats’. In response to school integration in the 1960s, many Yats moved out of the city, resettling in suburban towns like Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish, which had a separate school system from Orleans Parish2 (Campanella 2006). Chalmette is now viewed as the epicenter of Yat culture and language (Mucciaccio 2009), with the term ‘Yat’ losing ground to the toponymic label ‘Chalmatian,’ demonstrating the centrality of locale to identification as part of this sociocultural group. Used by Chalmette residents, the term Chalmatian indicates a down-to-earth and fun-loving resident; used by outsiders it is a derogatory slur associated with classlessness and ignorance, reflecting the stigma of being from Chalmette in the eyes of many New Orleanians. Modern-day Chalmette is a predominantly white, working-class community. The town consists of many dense, multiplex networks of residents, with the tight-knit pre-Katrina community often described as ‘one big family’ (Justin, returner) in which ‘everybody knew everybody’ (JuAllison, relocator). Although all of GNO has been slow to repopulate since Katrina, Chalmette was particularly affected, with a population decline of nearly 50 percent. The majority of these displaced Chalmatians have relocated to other less affected areas in GNO, with about a quarter of them settling on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain (Lasley 2012). The locations of Chalmette and the Northshore in relation to New Orleans are presented in Figure 1. The Northshore was not a heavily populated area until the 1990s, and population numbers have continued to rise since then. Popular perception on the Northshore places the blame for recent overcrowding on the post-Katrina arrival of Chalmatians, though census numbers reveal consistent population increases before and after the storm. This misperception has resulted in tension between longstanding Northshore residents and Chalmatian relocators. Relocated Chalmatians also face pressure from Chalmatians who returned to rebuild after the storm, due in part to local ideologies identifying the Northshore as the realm of the wealthy elite, which framed relocators as deserters. Returner Bella summarized this opinion, saying, ‘you move to [the Northshore] and you think you’re high and mighty. People like that, I don’t know. Those are not Chalmatians’. Yet many relocators expressed mixed opinions about whether they had fully integrated into life on the Northshore, or whether in contrast they were ‘true Chalmatians’. Because of the strong ideological rift between returners and relocators, but also varied orientations towards Chalmette coming from both groups, multiple measures relating to place were implemented in this study to capture the wide-ranging influences on linguistic practices in this situation of displacement.

Figure 1: Greater New Orleans, with Chalmette in St. Bernard Parish and the Northshore indicated in relationship to New Orleans proper [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] 3. R-LESSNESS IN GREATER NEW ORLEANS R-lessness is the variable absence of /ɹ/ in post-vocalic, syllable coda position followed by a consonant (e.g. ‘card’) or word boundary (e.g. ‘car’) (Nagy and Irwin 2010). Within the United States, (r) has been studied in black and white dialects of English spoken in Detroit (Wolfram 1969), New York City (Labov 2006 [1966]; Becker 2009), Alabama (Feagin 1990), Charleston, South Carolina (Baranowski 2007), Boston (Irwin and Nagy 2007), and New Hampshire (Nagy and Irwin 2010). In descriptions of New Orleans English, r-lessness is frequently mentioned as part of the distinctive local dialect (Rubrecht 1971; Coles 1997, 2001; Eble 2006; Labov 2007; Mucciaccio 2009). Research from 1951 to the present demonstrates an increase in r-fulness over time, from 4–13 percent r-ful (Reinecke 1951), to 30–50 percent (Brennan 1983), and finally to 49–66 percent r-ful (Schoux Casey 2013, 2016). Brennan and Schoux Casey found a tendency for lower rates of r-fulness amongst men and working-class speakers, but no significant difference between black and white speakers’ rates of r-fulness. Both researchers concluded that r-fulness has become a prestige marker in New Orleans, fueling the change in progress away from r-lessness. Chalmette has been identified as particularly conservative in retaining distinctive local linguistic features like r-lessness (Mucciaccio 2009; Carmichael 2014). For this

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 702 CARMICHAEL reason, and because of the disproportionate levels of Chalmatian displacement following Hurricane Katrina, the current study focuses on the dialect spoken by individuals from Chalmette (henceforth referred to as Chalmatian English, though many of its distinctive features are shared with neighboring dialects). Language patterns on the Northshore, where many Chalmatians relocated, are not clearly documented in the literature. Recordings of Northshore residents reveal no evidence that Northshore dialects feature variable r-lessness.

4. METHODS The data for this study were collected during nine months of ethnographic ﬁeldwork in Greater New Orleans in 2012. In addition to participant observation, I completed sociolinguistic interviews with 57 participants from Chalmette, and these are the focus of the linguistic analysis that follows. Information about these speakers can be found in the Appendix. Sociolinguistic interviews were recorded in WAV format with a Zoom H4 handy recorder and a Shure SM10A unidirectional headset microphone. At the end of the interview, speakers were asked to read aloud from a reading passage and word list. Fifteen to thirty minute segments of the conversational portion of interviews, plus the entire reading passage and word list, were transcribed and analyzed. These three elicitation modes may be thought of as representing a continuum of speech conditions ranging from most monitored (word list) to least (conversational), though the recordings cannot fully capture the complex range of stylistic effects on speech patterns, and there are valid critiques of considering recorded interview speech as a participant’s default or vernacular form of speech (Wolfson 1976; Eckert and Rickford 2001). All tokens from the reading passage and word list were included in the coded corpus, along with the ﬁrst 50 tokens of (r) in the transcribed portion of each interview. A total of 8,290 tokens of (r) were analyzed (981 from the word list [~17 per speaker], 4,455 from the reading passage [~78 per speaker], and 2,854 from interview speech [~50 per speaker]). Following research on (r) in North America, I coded the data impressionistically into binary categories by marking each token as either r-ful (r-1) or r-less (r-0). Some researchers (e.g. Hay and Maclagan 2010) have used F3 height as an acoustic measure of (r) constriction rather than relying on binary categorization as r-ful and r-less, though others (e.g. Heselwood 2009; Nagy and Irwin 2010) report mixed results with this approach. In my coding, I used both auditory cues and visual indications from the spectrogram (i.e. F3 height) in categorizing tokens of (r), to make use of acoustic information about constriction while retaining comparability with other studies of rhoticity. As a check on my coding, two undergraduate interns from Ohio independently coded a sample of 400 (r) tokens across all three conditions (5% of the total corpus). Inter-coder reliability analysis revealed 80 percent agreement between the three of us, with a kappa statistic of .73, indicating good reliability (Clopper 2011).

The corpus was coded for a number of linguistic factors based on previous studies of (r):

• preceding/containing vowel (START /ɑ/, SQUARE /e/, NEAR /i/, FORCE /ɔ/, NURSE /ɝ/, and LETTER /ɚ/); • word type (lexical vs. function word); and • morphological environment s word-final preceding a pause, ‘I don’t care.’ 3 s word-final preceding a vowel, ‘I don’t care about that’ s word-final preceding a consonant, ‘I don’t care to go’ s morpheme-internal in a closed syllable, ‘girl’ s morpheme-internal in an open syllable, ‘early’ s morpheme-final in a closed syllable, ‘cares’ s morpheme-final in an open syllable, ‘careful’. What I am calling morphological environment collapses both morphological and phonological information, since it captures where in the word a token is located (word-final, morpheme-final, morpheme-internal), syllable type (open or closed), and the following sound in the case of adjacent word boundary (pause, vowel, consonant). This decision was made because some combinations of these factors were not possible (e.g. only word-final tokens can precede a pause; no word-final tokens can be closed syllables), and to make findings more easily comparable to existing scholarship on variable rhoticity in North America. Syllable stress is almost entirely captured by the preceding/containing vowel sets, since unstressed syllables within this corpus were all reduced to schwar, with a handful of exceptions (0.005% of the corpus; words like ‘unif orm’ which appeared three times, and ‘carcinoma’ which appeared once). Social factors included in the model were speaker age, gender, social class, post-Katrina location status, and extra-Chalmatian orientation. Age was treated as a continuous variable, and gender as binary since no speakers identified outside of male/female identifiers. While Chalmette is a working-class community, speakers had different occupations and educational backgrounds, so social class represented an index calculated based on speaker’s education, occupation, and high school type (public versus private – a salient class marker within GNO). Post-Katrina location status captured the speaker’s residential status at the time of the interview – whether they had returned to Chalmette, or relocated following Hurricane Katrina. Unlike many other studies of second dialect acquisition, the amount of time spent in the new dialect area was controlled for across participants; everyone had been displaced for a period of seven years at the time of their interviews due to the storm. However, participant observation and commentary from interviews revealed that this choice was impacted by more complex factors than desire to live in Chalmette vs. elsewhere. To capture the variation in place orientation within both returner and relocator groups, I developed extra-Chalmatian orientation scores.

Extra-Chalmatian orientation scores consist of points assigned to each participant according to their stance towards and pre-Katrina exposure to places outside Chalmette, based on ethnographic ﬁeldwork and self-report during interviews. Five categories of scoring were calculated as detailed in Table 1, with resulting scores ranging from -5 to 16. Within this metric, to get a negative extra-Chalmatian orientation score (meaning most strongly oriented towards Chalmette), an individual must essentially never have lived outside Chalmette before the storm, express a strong connection to Chalmette as a place, and explicitly state they never wanted to leave. Table 1 demonstrates that extra-Chalmatian orientation scores contain stance indicators (a) and (b), while categories (c), (d), and (e) consist of factual information about the locations where participants spend/spent time. Yet even these less stance-based indicators are informed by ethnographic insights. For example, many participants reported that attending high school or college outside of Chalmette was a revelatory experience, as Big G (relocator) explains:

once I got [to college] I realized, hey wait a minute, the whole world isn’t centered around St. Bernard [...] a lot of my friends [in Chalmette], they just shallow. And I mean shallow in the sense that they haven’t experienced everything else.

The participants who expressed a connection with this less Chalmette-centric view of the world seemed to orient less to traditional linguistic and cultural ways of expressing a Chalmatian identity. As participants explained, being a Chalmatian is not only identifying with Chalmette as a place and participating in Chalmette’s social structures, it also relates to actively avoiding interactions with outsiders. Thus, for Chalmatians, seeking out exposure to outsiders in some sense is a stance-taking action, expressing an orientation to outside norms. Indeed, part of the reason that this scale is organized in terms of extra- Chalmatian orientation, or orientation to places outside of Chalmette, is because of how many participants expressed that such behavior is meaningful within St. Bernard, whereas being locally oriented is the norm. By developing a measure that combines these ways of orienting towards and away from Chalmette, I was able to include in the statistical model one coherent way of categorizing individuals according to (extra-)local orientation, capturing something entirely different from their current physical location, and grouping individuals in a way that was supported by ethnographic insights.

5. RESULTS The overall rate of r-fulness in this dataset of Chalmatian English speakers was 65 percent, with interview speech 57 percent r-ful. These numbers are comparable to Schoux Casey’s (2013, 2016) reported 55–61 percent r-fulness for her corpus of post-Katrina residents of New Orleans. Interestingly, this patterning suggests that Chalmette residents are not more r-less than residents

Table 1: Extra-Chalmatian orientation scores

Category Measure a. Identification as À2 Identifies enthusiastically as Chalmatian Chalmatian À1 Qualified identification (e.g. ‘I guess’) 0 No data1 +1 Qualified non-identification (e.g. ‘I guess’) +2 Identifies enthusiastically as non-Chalmatian b. Desire to leave À1 Never wanted to leave Chalmette 0 No explicit statement about desire to leave2 +1 Wanted to leave c. Residential history3 +5 Left Chalmette before Katrina +1 Lived in GNO outside of Chalmette for <5 years +2 “ “ for >5 years +5 “ “ for >10 years +5 Lived outside of GNO <5 years +7“ “>5 years +10 “ “ >10 years +1 Evacuated and spent >1 year outside of GNO4 d. Schooling À1 Attended HS in Chalmette +1 “ “ outside of Chalmette +1 Attended college outside of Chalmette, but in Louisiana +2 “ “ outside of Louisiana e. Workplace À1 Currently works in Chalmette +1 “ “ outside of Chalmette

1N=1; one participant who had to cut his interview short and was never able to reschedule. 2N=13, because this was not a topic that I explicitly brought up during interviews; this was a category motivated by the sheer number of participants who discussed it. Thus if this topic did not come up, it is likely that the participant did not feel strongly either way, which is equally worth capturing. 3Only years preceding Katrina counted towards extra-Chalmatian orientation scores. Years after Katrina were accounted for already in post-Katrina location status. Because of this, a number of relocators received negative extra-Chalmatian orientation scores, indicating their strong orientation towards Chalmette despite leaving after the storm. 4Since all Chalmette residents were displaced for some period of time following Hurricane Katrina, participants were only assigned a point if they spent over a year somewhere outside of GNO, during which time they would have presumably integrated more fully into another speech community. of New Orleans proper, despite the commonly held perception in the public imagination that Chalmatians are more ‘accented’ (Mucciaccio 2009). Schoux Casey’s sample included white, black, and Creole participants, which may

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 706 CARMICHAEL account for the similarity between her rates of r-lessness and mine, since black New Orleanians have been shown to resemble Chalmatians more than white New Orleanians in terms of r-lessness (Dajko, Schoux Casey and Carmichael 2013). To examine overall patterning of (r) based on linguistic and social predictors, I generated a logistic mixed effects regression model for the data, performing a ‘step-up’ analysis, which involves adding predictors one by one to a bare model in order to complete a model comparison, determining which variables significantly improve the predictive power of the model. Included in the full model were the following predictors: preceding vowel, word type, morphological environment, age, speech type, gender, social class, post-Katrina location status, and extra-Chalmatian orientation, along with random effects of speaker and word. In building the model, linguistic factors were always added to the model before social factors, to ensure that the predictive power of internal factors was accounted for before social factors. Table 2 presents the results of the best model for (r) in Chalmatian English. In this model, significant predictors – in terms of their relationship to the reference point within each factor group – are reported with p values set at <0.05. Coefficient estimates provide an indication of the strength and direction of the effect. For categorical variables, percentages of tokens that were r-ful are provided in the table for ease of interpretation; patterning of (r) according to continuous variables age and extra-Chalmatian variation will be described in further detail below. Table 2 demonstrates that linguistic effects of preceding/containing vowel and morphological environment were selected as significant predictors of (r), while word type (lexical or function word) was not. The social factors selected as significant predictors were age, speech type, gender, and extra-Chalmatian orientation, while social class and post-Katrina location status did not predict (r). Crucially, this patterning means that Chalmette residents who relocated to the Northshore post-Katrina were no more likely to produce (r-1) than those who returned to Chalmette after the storm – but that their orientation towards Chalmette did affect their r-fulness. Internal factors impacting (r) in Chalmatian English mostly matched previous studies of post-vocalic r-lessness in New Orleans. Table 2 reveals that the strongest effect in terms of preceding/containing vowel types was the contrast between stressed /ɝ/ and the reference point of unstressed /ɚ/, with /ɝ/ most favoring r-fulness (80% [r-1]) and /ɚ/ least (55% [r-1]). This pattern is common across studies of (r) in North America, which generally find varied ordering of preceding vowels across dialects, ‘bookended’ by stressed and unstressed schwar (cf. Nagy and Irwin 2010). Contexts that are morpheme- final (e.g. careful, cares) and word-final preceding a consonant (e.g. I don’t care to go) most strongly disfavor r-ful pronunciations. Based on the similarities between Schoux Casey’s results and those presented here, the system of r-lessness in Chalmatian English does not seem qualitatively different from that found in city limits.

Table 2: Regression table for (r) (Est. = estimate; SE = standard error)

% (r-1) Est. SE z value Pr(>|z|)

(Intercept) 6.475 0.810 7.994 < 0.0001*** Vowel (reference point: ɚ ‘LETTER’) 55 ɝ ‘NURSE’ 80 2.397 0.253 9.482 < 0.0001*** ɔ ‘FORCE’ 66 0.708 0.249 2.841 0.0045** e‘SQUARE’66À0.059 0.350 À0.169 0.8656 i‘NEAR’ 63 0.781 0.384 2.037 0.0416* ɑ ‘START’62À0.054 0.284 À0.191 0.8483 Morphological environment (reference point: word-final 73 preceding a pause) Word-final preceding 53 À1.382 0.162 À8.528 < 0.0001*** a consonant e.g. ‘I don’t care to go’ Word-final preceding a vowel 72 0.220 0.18 1.224 0.2207 e.g. ‘I don’t care about that’ Morpheme-internal, 74 0.141 0.281 0.501 0.616 closed syllable e.g. ‘girl’ Morpheme-internal, 71 À0.397 0.289 À1.372 0.17 open syllable e.g. ‘early’ Morpheme-final, closed syllable 55 À0.621 0.297 À2.091 0.0365* e.g. ‘cares’ Morpheme-final, open syllable 49 À2.373 0.462 À5.134 < 0.0001*** e.g. ‘careful’ Speech type (reference point: word list) 87 Reading passage 66 À1.692 0.26 À6.521 < 0.0001*** Interview 57 À2.849 0.261 À10.895 < 0.0001*** Gender (reference point: men) 62 Women 68 1.417 0.507 2.798 0.0051** Age À0.082 0.014 À5.781 < 0.0001*** Extra-Chalmatian orientation 0.222 0.049 4.545 < 0.0001***

*< 0.05 **< 0.01 ***< 0.001

Age was a signiﬁcant predictor of (r), with younger speakers most r-ful. Interpreted in terms of apparent time, this patterning follows with the ﬁndings of previous studies completed in GNO, which have demonstrated a change in

Figure 2: Rates of r-fulness according to age progress. Since Chalmette is considered a more conservative area in terms of traditional New Orleans linguistic features, this finding reflects that the shift towards r-fulness is quite robust in the region, even impacting Chalmatian English. Figure 2 presents a closer look at this patterning across participants in the current study. Figure 2 demonstrates that the shift towards r-fulness has taken the largest leap with the youngest speakers. Indeed, speakers under 30 in my sample featured (r-0) nearly 30 percent less often than the rest of the speakers in this study. Furthermore, two of the nine participants under thirty were exclusively r-ful throughout all three conditions, and another two featured fewer than 10 r-less tokens – indicating that the future of Chalmatian English is as a fully r-ful dialect. Other significant social effects include speech type, speaker gender, and extra-Chalmatian orientation. Participants were most r-ful during the word list (87% [r-1]) and least r-ful in interview speech (57% [r-1]), and women produced more (r-1) (68%) than men (62%). Brennan (1983) and Schoux Casey (2013, 2016) found similar patterning in their own New Orleans English data sets, suggesting that despite local dialectal variation in (r), New Orleanians orient towards broader Northern American linguistic norms in terms of producing more (r-1) in more monitored speech conditions. Though (r-1) is overtly prestigious, there is covert prestige to using r-less pronunciations, which along with other ‘Yatty’ features have been shown to index authenticity, uniqueness, and local pride (Coles 2001; Schoux Casey 2013, 2016; Carmichael and Dajko 2016). These locally valued, covertly

Figure 3: Rates of r-fulness according to extra-Chalmatian orientation prestigious qualities are likely also behind the signiﬁcant effect of extra- Chalmatian orientation, the results of which can be seen in Figure 3, which demonstrates a clear trend in rates of (r) across orientation scores, ranging from lowest (most oriented to Chalmette) to highest (most oriented to places outside Chalmette). Most speakers range between orientation scores of -5 and 5, and for these speakers there is quite a bit of variation across individuals in terms of r-fulness. In contrast, all speakers with a score of over 5 exhibit particularly high rates of (r-1) – thus, it is the speakers who are least oriented towards Chalmette who are driving this effect. These speakers are the most r-ful in the sample, nearly 20 percent more r-ful on average than speakers with an extra-Chalmatian orientation score of 1 or less. Below, I discuss the interpretations of these patterns.

6. DISCUSSION This study approached the analysis of language and place in two ways: through consideration of movement across space (post-Katrina location status) and through examination of orientation to certain locales (extra-Chalmatian orientation scores). One of the most striking ﬁndings relating to these metrics was that whether a speaker had returned or relocated following the storm was not a signiﬁcant predictor of r-lessness, but that extra-Chalmatian orientation was. Speakers who were most oriented to places outside of Chalmette were also those who used the lowest rates of r-lessness in their speech. Thus, physical

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 710 CARMICHAEL displacement following Hurricane Katrina does not seem to have had a strong effect on language practices; Chalmatians who relocated to the predominantly r-ful Northshore featured similar rates of r-lessness to those who returned to their hometown of Chalmette after the storm. That said, the effect of extra- Chalmatian orientation on (r) suggests that the role of place in this context is still crucial; it is just not satisfactorily measured by physical location of the speaker alone. Recall that since displacement occurred as a result of Hurricane Katrina, all relocators had been displaced for a period of seven years. The fact that there were such wide-ranging rates of r-lessness across this group thus demonstrates that time of exposure to a new dialect alone is also not necessarily the key to understanding language patterns. One point worth addressing, however, is that being displaced for seven years starting at age 78 (the age of the oldest participant in the sample when Katrina hit) is quite a different affair from relocating at age 11 (the age of the youngest participant when Katrina hit), since age-of-arrival has been found to be a significant contributor to second dialect acquisition (Fix 2013; Nycz 2015). And indeed, it was noted above that participants under 30 years of age were more likely to be categorically r-ful than participants over 30, which suggests there may be linguistic effects of Hurricane Katrina that simply have not become clear yet in the time that has passed since the storm. If there has been an effect, it appears to have been an acceleration of the change already in progress towards r-fulness. The change in progress towards r-fulness is part of what allows r-less pronunciations to function as a resource for Chalmatian English speakers to express affiliation with their home dialect area. As the locus of traditional New Orleans English features shifted to Chalmette in the 1960s, r-lessness in particular developed strong place-linked associations with Chalmette. The shift away from r-lessness in GNO makes its use noticeable and marked, and thus ideal for identity expression – as Becker (2009) found on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where speakers used r-lessness as a means of distinguishing themselves from new arrivals. Like the Lower East Side, post-Katrina GNO has been a context of population flux, foregrounding place-linked components of an ‘authentic New Orleans identity’, which may be claimed on the basis of using these marked, traditional features (Carmichael and Dajko 2016). The marked quality of r-lessness within GNO is significant, since research on migration and second dialect acquisition has demonstrated that stigmatized and ideologically marked linguistic features are often those most likely to be dropped when speakers leave their home dialect area – unless there are attitudinal or identity-driven reasons for retaining them (Auer, Barden and Grosskopf 1998, 2000; Meyerhoff and Walker 2007; Hazen and Hamilton 2008; Nycz 2015). Salience of linguistic features has also been shown to be a significant predictor of linguistic choices in contexts of movement or displacement (Stanford and Pan 2013; Cotter and Horesh 2015). R-lessness in Chalmatian English appears to be both socially and linguistically salient.

Speakers’ increased r-fulness in the reading passage and word list suggest some level of awareness of (r-1) as the prestige norm. Moreover, while there are other linguistic features that characterize Chalmatian English, none were brought up as often by participants as r-lessness was, with a number of participants commenting speciﬁcally on r-lessness when asked about ‘the Chalmette accent’:

Benjamin (31, relocator): As far as people from Chalmette and the accent that we have, it’s uh, you know, instead of – like in Boston when they replace the r with the w, just kind of glob it all together. ‘Lifeguard’ [laɪfɡɔd] and ‘water’ [wɑɾə] and things like that, you know. Buckaroo (25, relocator): The Chalmette accent’s like a mixture of just, it’s like lazy Brooklyn. You know, you just walk in like, ‘I’ma open up the door [dɔ], get the computer [kəmpjuɾə] out, get me a glass of water [wɑɾə].’

The quotes above demonstrate an awareness of the link between r-lessness and being identifiably Chalmatian. Participants also described being identified as Chalmatian by residents on the Northshore based on their speech, and at times treated unkindly once that conclusion was drawn. Thus, it is not a minor identity move to continue use of stigmatized Chalmatian English features such as r-lessness in response to such treatment. In contexts of displacement or migration, speakers are prone to orient between linguistic poles: there are the norms associated with where they came from, or those associated with where they have relocated to. Expressing a linguistic link to one pole or another is one way of expressing allegiance to one’s preferred home – the place with which they most identify. This identity move is particularly salient if movement was involuntary, as in the result of political upheaval (cf. Cotter and Horesh 2015) or in the case of the current study, following a natural disaster, since voluntary mobility has been shown to correlate with other personality factors that predispose individuals to be more open to adopting new linguistic variants (Urbatsch 2015). Thus, we can think of speakers with high extra-Chalmatian orientation scores as those most likely to dissociate with Chalmette as a place, and we can interpret these speakers’ low rates of r-lessness as a linguistic expression of their affiliation with places external to their hometown, whether the Northshore or elsewhere. This sort of extra-local orientation in post-Katrina Greater New Orleans has been documented within city limits as well: Schoux Casey (2013, 2016) devised a topic-based, discourse analytic approach to categorizing speakers according to orientation towards New Orleans versus external orientation, finding that externally oriented speakers used lower rates of r-lessness than locally oriented speakers. That is, even more broadly in GNO outside of Chalmette, those speakers who least value their local connections are most r-ful, whereas those wishing to emphasize their local ties appeal to traditional linguistic features such as r-lessness.

Another factor speciﬁcally impacting place-linked linguistic variation in post-Katrina New Orleans is the ‘nostalgia culture’ that has come to the fore since the storm. Schoux Casey (2013: 143) explains:

The disappearance of the city created an absence, a loss, which triggered a nostalgic valorization of all things local, including language [...] Locally- branded merchandise provides both an avenue for the consumption and display of place-bound identity and strengthens, through its own existence and dissemination, the perception of local language as valuable.

The commodification of local linguistic features like r-lessness in GNO to index authenticity pre-dates Katrina (Coles 2001), though since the storm such practices have escalated dramatically (Carmichael and Dajko 2016). Commodification of linguistic features is part of a dialogic enregisterment process. For commodification to occur, there must be some level of linguistic awareness surrounding the existence of a given linguistic feature and its connection to certain social qualities; however, the commodification further circulates and builds on these associations (Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006; Johnstone 2009). In the case of traditional New Orleanian linguistic features such as r-lessness, the associations are clearly those of unique, fun- loving, authentic and down-to-earth locals (Carmichael and Dajko 2016; Schoux Casey 2016). However, this association is at odds with disdain for these features when uttered by working-class Chalmatians (Carmichael 2015). That is, the abstract notion of an accented local is marketable – one can literally buy and wear one’s local status – while genuine use of r-less pronunciations outside of such self-conscious performances remains stigmatized. Nostalgia culture and language commodification are active in Chalmette as well as within New Orleans city limits. Imagery and linguistic representations that evoke nostalgia for an authentic, pre-Katrina past can be seen in merchandise throughout the parish, though the target audience in this case is clear: only ‘true’ Chalmatians can appreciate such products. Figure 4, for example, shows a tee shirt that reads, ‘I (hawt) da Parish: Rebuild St. Bernard, Louisiana’, with a dialect spelling version of the word ‘heart’ pronounced r-lessly. In this instance, an r-less pronunciation is tied to an expression of locality and loyalty, by way of encouraging the rebuilding of St. Bernard Parish – in which Chalmette is located – after the storm. Understanding the patterning of r-lessness in Chalmatian English is intricately tied to understanding the politics of living in post-Katrina Greater New Orleans. Most locals divide time based on ‘before the storm’ and ‘after the storm’. Before the storm, Chalmette was a largely homogenous community – ethnically, socially, and linguistically – without much exposure to outside norms, which is in part what encouraged retention of externally stigmatized linguistic features. But since Hurricane Katrina, both returners and relocators have experienced exposure to outsiders, which has increased their awareness of

Figure 4: Image from Cafe Press tee shirt (http://www.cafepress.com/mf/ 9482115/womens_tshirt?productId=37287467) the distinctive local accent. Similar processes were key in the enregisterment of Pittsburghese, a dialect that went largely unnoticed until increased geographic mobility brought outsiders after World War II, providing a point of comparison against which the traditional working-class features of Pittsburghers began to build associations of locality and authenticity (Johnstone, Andrus and Danielson 2006). Thus, while post-Katrina movement does not appear to have caused a shift within the speech of relocators in contrast with returners, it may have contributed to their building awareness about features like r-lessness and its associations with a Chalmette-based identity, thereby making such links exploitable for identity work.

7. CONCLUSIONS Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans had one of the highest retention rates for residents born and raised in the region (Aisch and Gebeloff 2014). The storm changed the social fabric of the city, redistributing its citizens who were previously stratiﬁed across neighborhoods according to ethnicity and social class, bringing into everyday contact cross-sections of New Orleanians who previously avoided each other. This post-hurricane reshufﬂing has highlighted claims to locality and authenticity, as well as emotional ties to home (Carmichael and Dajko 2016; Schoux Casey 2016). For this reason, post- Katrina GNO provides an important site for research into the ways place-linked linguistic variables may be employed in identity construction and performance. The situation in GNO intersects with issues of interest within sociolinguistics such as globalization, immigration, and diaspora. How do speakers who live in one locale, but have physical and emotional ties to another, express that allegiance linguistically? Additionally, the results of this study inform second dialect acquisition research, indicating that place orientation may represent

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 714 CARMICHAEL another dimension that should be considered in research on movement across dialect boundaries. The primary goal of this analysis was to understand the relationship between place orientation and rates of r-lessness in post-Katrina GNO. The analysis presented in this paper demonstrated that while returning versus relocating following the storm did not signiﬁcantly predict variation, a multifaceted measure of orientation towards Chalmette did predict r-lessness, with speakers who were least oriented towards Chalmette also using locally marked r-less pronunciations at the lowest rates. These results suggest an agentive, identity- driven quality to (r) variation in GNO, rather than a merely geographic motivation to using r-less pronunciations in speech. Through this analysis, I have argued for the importance of building more complex methods for characterizing speakers’ orientations to place, to account for an increasingly mobile, globalized population. The context of post-Katrina movement provides a natural laboratory for such examinations of language and displacement, in which place-linked identity and regionally-marked dialectal features are foregrounded. Extra-Chalmatian orientation scores were developed to capture the varied orientations that returners and relocators adopted towards their hometown of Chalmette, since ‘different speakers may orient to place, linguistically, in very different ways and for different purposes’ (Johnstone 2004: 66). These scores provide a model of one way to translate complex ethnographic insights into a single measure for statistical analysis. Replicability and comparability between studies is important to the venture of variationist sociolinguistics; however, since the identity of a place is locally deﬁned, and one’s relationship to it a personal and subjective matter, the methods for examining place orientation ought to be equally local and subjective – thus making ethnography the ideal approach for better understanding this factor. As researchers continue to grapple with capturing the variation observed in an increasingly mobile population, I encourage further development across speech communities of measures like the extra-Chalmatian orientation measure presented in this paper.

NOTES 1. I would like to thank the residents of Chalmette who welcomed me into their community and took the time to speak with me. I would also like to thank Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Cynthia Clopper, Don Winford, Galey Modan, Marivic Lesho, Allan Bell, David Britain, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions which have greatly improved this paper from inception to publication. Final thanks go to Katie Garahan for her help preparing revisions while I juggled academic responsibilities with caring for a newborn. Any remaining errors in this article are my own. 2. Parishes are the equivalent of counties elsewhere in the U.S. New Orleans proper is within Orleans Parish; Chalmette is within St. Bernard Parish, which is located adjacent to Orleans Parish.

3. While in some variably rhotic dialects word-ﬁnal contexts preceding a vowel would be the site of consistent sandhi or ‘linking-r’, in this dataset there was indeed variation in this context, so it was included in analysis.

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APPENDIX: Participant information All pseudonyms were selected by participants. All participants were white, reﬂecting the demographic history of Chalmette. ECO = extra-Chalmation orientation.

Pseudonym Status Gender Age ECO

Acilie relocator female 62 À5 Allie returner female 41 0 Bella returner female 46 À5 Benjamin relocator male 31 1 Big G relocator male 50 À1 Buckaroo relocator female 25 9 Cecilia returner female 70 À2 Chastity relocator female 42 0 Chocolate relocator female 53 À4 Chris returner male 21 1 Christian returner male 49 4 Daisy returner female 18 À1 Dave returner male 19 À2 Dayle relocator female 66 À1 Ed returner male 57 À5 Ellie returner female 18 À2 Frank relocator male 60 0 Gaston relocator male 85 1 Greg returner male 31 5

Appendix (continued)

Pseudonym Status Gender Age ECO

Haylie relocator female 22 2 Herman relocator male 50 0 Jennifer relocator female 41 0 JuAllison relocator female 33 À3 Justin returner male 29 À2 Katherine relocator female 57 11 Killa B returner female 50 À3 Lance relocator male 30 12 Luke returner male 31 À5 Mandy relocator female 45 À3 Margaret relocator female 59 5 Maria relocator female 71 À3 Mark relocator male 34 6 Mary relocator female 76 À2 Max relocator male 27 6 McKenzie relocator female 20 0 Molly returner female 23 À2 Momma B returner female 48 À5 Mr. B relocator male 68 3 NiceN’Happy returner male 47 À3 Nunu returner male 75 À2 Parrain returner male 42 À4 Paul returner male 22 À3 Pauly returner male 67 À3 Peaches returner female 56 8 Rayne returner female 50 À5 Roger relocator male 29 15 Ronda returner female 85 À1 Rosalee returner female 50 À3 Rosie returner female 69 À3 Sam relocator male 62 1 Sandra relocator female 31 3 Sara returner female 31 1 Savannah returner female 32 À4 Sugar Magnolia returner female 42 11 Super returner female 62 À3 Victor relocator male 47 16 Yoda relocator male 45 10

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