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Dialect leveling and /ai/ monophthongization among African American Detroiters
Author(s) -
Anderson Bridget L.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of sociolinguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9841
pISSN - 1360-6441
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9481.00178
Subject(s) - salient , american english , african american , white (mutation) , context (archaeology) , linguistics , sound change , geography , history , ethnology , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , archaeology , gene
In this paper I present evidence that Detroit African Americans are participating in a recent sound change which is typically associated with some White, but not African American, varieties in the American South. Although both Southern White and African American speakers monophthongize /ai/ in pre‐voiced phonetic contexts ( tide ), the spread of the monophthongal or glide‐reduced variant to pre‐voiceless environments ( tight ) is a salient characteristic of some subregions of the Southern U.S. I report a leveling pattern in which /ai/ monophthongization has expanded to the salient pre‐voiceless context in Detroit African American English (AAE). I explain this is in terms of a change in the group with whom African American speakers perceive themselves as saliently contrastive.