DOI: 10.1111/josl.12345 ORIGINAL ARTICLE The MOUTHs of others: The linguistic performance of race in Bermuda Rosemary Hall University of Oxford, UK Abstract Correspondence This paper examines the behaviour of one linguistic feature Rosemary Hall, Faculty of Linguistics, among one black and one white group of Bermudian men Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford, Clarendon Institute, Walton Street, over the age of 50. The acoustic analysis of the MOUTH vowel, Oxford, OX1 2HG, UK. one of the most heavily stereotyped sounds of Bermudian Email:
[email protected] English, is used as a window onto linguistic parody ob- served in the white group, a community of practice known locally for theatrical dialect performance. In combination with contextual analysis, and in light of social conditions in Bermuda, phonetic findings suggest that this linguistic practice is not only a performance of “Bermudian‐ness,” but also a performance of a racialized stereotype which reflects and reinforces the raciolinguistic hierarchies of contempo- rary Bermudian society. The paper introduces this under‐re- searched and unusual sociolinguistic setting to the literature on racialized mock language, as well as attesting further to the usefulness of methods that examine highly self‐con- scious speech. KEYWORDS Bermudian English, mock language, MOUTH vowel, performance speech, race, stereotypes 1 | INTRODUCTION As part of an increased focus on stylization in sociolinguistics, many studies have focused on the use of linguistic features by groups who do not traditionally use them, inspired by Bakhtin's concept of multiple This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.