2008/08/01 by Maeve Eberhardt · 2 citations
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Multilingual Education and Policy #African american #American English #History #Linguistics #Feature (linguistics) #White (mutation) #Ethnology
paper · doi:10.1215/00031283-2008-021
openalex publication_date 2008/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This article investigates the status of the low-back vowels in African American English in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the vowels have been merged since at least the late 1800s. The low-back merger is currently spreading across much of the United States, but to date, its incidence in African American speech has been found to be limited. This article draws from a sample of 34 African Americans native to Pittsburgh. Using data from a word list along with an acoustic analysis of the low-back vowels in conversational speech from sociolinguistic interviews, this article shows that African Americans in Pittsburgh have merged the low-back vowels, thus sharing in this feature of the local phonological system. The article also explores the sociohistorical conditions that facilitated the spread of the merger from white to African American speech in the region.