The speakers are all young, working-class, white Chicagoans, rather uniform in age and social class. One was interviewed in 1970, and the others almost twenty years later, so some real-time evidence of sound change in progress is present in this data. In all cases a Nagra tape-recorder was used to make the recording, on 1/4'' open-reel audio tape.7.2
The first speaker, analysed most extensively, will be called Rita. She was interviewed in May, 1990,7.3 at a Catholic high school just outside the Chicago city limits, where she was a senior at the time. She is white, ethnically Italian, and grew up in a mostly Italian and Irish working-class neighborhood in the mid-west of Chicago proper. She is not as advanced in some of the Chicago sound changes as many speakers,7.4 but her speech is nonetheless clearly a Chicago vernacular. The entire 25-minute interview was acoustically analysed, including both careful- and casual-style speech.7.5
The second speaker I will call Jim. He was interviewed in January, 1970, by Benjamin Wald, then a student of Labov's on a field-work trip to Chicago from New York. Jim was 15 years old at the time, and gives the impression, both by his speech style and the stories he tells, of being a street-wise, tough young man. He grew up in Irish and black neighborhoods in the southwest of Chicago proper, and was interviewed in a group hangout with other members of a white street gang. By the admiration he recieves from off-mike speakers, it would appear that Jim is the leader of his group. Despite considerable contact with black speakers (he says he was the only white person in his eighth grade class, before his family moved to its current neighborhood), I can identify no distinctively African-American English features in Jim's speech. The non-assimilated nature of his accent fits the pattern of the lack of transmission of dialect features across this ethnic boundary found in Philadelphia (Ash & Myhill 1986). It is clear upon listening that Jim is an impressive vernacular speaker of Chicago White English. Four narratives, were analysed, constituting 11.5 minutes of speech.
The third speaker, here called Judy, was also interviewed by Sharon Ash, in April 1988. She was recorded in a quiet room after a linguistics class at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, a commuter school serving urban Chicago. Her parents are Polish and Armenian; she has a passive understanding of Armenian through listening to her father's parents, but claims she cannot speak it, and has no competence in Polish. She was 19 years old, lived with her mother, and worked while attending school. She grew up in Chicago proper, near Wrigley Field to the north of downtown, and exhibits something of a disdain for wealthier suburbanites who ``can't scratch two dimes together'' because they so commonly use ``plastic money'' -- credit cards. Judy is the most advanced7.6 speaker of the three; some sentences from this interview were used in the experiments of the project on Cross-Dialectal Comprehension as extreme examples of Chicago advanced sound changes. In those experiments it was found that phonetically advanced vowel tokens are confusable with other sound classes by speakers of other dialects. 9.5 minutes of narratives were extracted from the interview and analysed.
A tradeoff was found between the carefulness of the speech and the amount of background noise. Background noise and noises were minimal for Ash's interviews of Rita and Judy, but a larger quantity of speech was needed to get the same amount of narrative speech. On the other hand background noises and overlapping speech in the Jim's interview caused 18% of his tokens to be thrown out, but the speech style was quite un-self-conscious. In no case were measurements taken where they did not clearly reflect a formant in the subject's speech, as shown by listening to the vowel and by visual examination of a spectrogram of it.