2015/02/20 by Alicia Beckford Wassink · 2 citations
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Multilingual Education and Policy #Sociolinguistics #Focus (optics) #Linguistics #Vowel #History #Ethnic group #Key (lock) #Psychology #Sociology #Anthropology #Computer science
paper · doi:10.1017/s0954394514000234
openalex publication_date 2015/02/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract Although it was the focus of several publications by Carroll Reed in the 1950s and early 1960s, English spoken in the Pacific Northwestern United States (PNWE) has received minimal research attention in variationist sociolinguistics. This paper provides the first report from an ongoing sociophonetic study. Data from a single-ethnicity, 25-person subsample of the larger corpus, constituted to explore change in apparent time, clarifies Seattleites' use of key markers of Western speech, including merger of cot /a/ and caught /ɔ/, and the positions of all vowel phonemes in the system. Several heretofore unreported characteristic features are found, including a tendency for PNWE speakers to monophthongize /e:/ bake and to raise prevelar /æ/ bag and /ε/ beg toward /e:/.