Social Meaning and Sound Change

Finished · Social Influences on Speech

Summary

This chapter looks at sound change in California [ou] fronting from roughly the 1920s to 1990s for Irish and Chinese Americans in a certain district. F2 trajectory analyses show that women born earlier have more backed BOAT vowels compared to younger women. Additionally, women in the early 1930s or so and in the later 1980s-90s do not show a difference in fronting/backing when discussing ethnicity vs not. The authors show that women born in the 1970s DO show a backed BOAT vowel when talking about ethnicity, and argue that this is because there was a period of social transition in this time when Asian women had more need to establish their identities through speech. As a result, a backed BOAT vowel signified indexiing oneself with ``Asian''.

Interestingly, there is no affect of age or ethnicity observed among men. The reason for this - proposed by the authors - is that fronted BOAT vowels is indexed with flamboyancy, so men in this region actively avoid the fronting sound change to avoid flamboyent indexed speech.

Ultimately, the authors argue that their results support a view in which sound change correlates with changes in indexicality of certain features. Indexed speech features are particularly important in contexts in which one's social identity is less clearly cemented or controversial.

While sound change was not instigated by social meaning perse, it is argued that it is carried out through different communities due to different indexical patterns.