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Alabama English

This chapter presents analyses of the surface phonology and phonetics of the vowel system of a variety of Southern States English found in Anniston, Alabama. As in other chapters, I discuss the vowel system's surface inventory and structure, some impressionistic transcriptions, the overall shape of vowel space, the sound changes that relate this dialect to others, and the effects of phrasal stress on vowel. This chapter is an extension of Feagin's research on this variety, which concerns including the linguistic and social patterning of tense, mood, aspect, agreement, and negation forms (1979), of non-prevocalic /r/ and other vowel-related changes (1990), of the up-gliding and in-gliding of /æ/ (in press), and other reports, using the speech of this speaker and others interviewed by Feagin between 1968 and 1973. Unlike her work, however, this study is in large part non-developmental. Social and historical differences are discussed only incidentally here. The phonological analysis is based largely on previous published work on Alabama and Southern English, while the phonetic analysis considers measurements of 1637 vowels taken from the conversational speech of a single speaker from Anniston.



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next up previous
Next: Characteristics of the Speaker Up: English Vowels: Their Surface Previous: Summary
Thomas Veatch 2005-01-25