Cindy Bernstein and Barb Haertl

Labov (1991) proposed three dialects of American English:  one characterized by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, one characterized by the Southern Vowel Shift, and one characterized by the merger of the low-back vowels as in cot and caught.  Southerners were thought not to participate in this merger.  Further, data were inadequate to consider the possibility of the merger in the speech of non-Whites.  In recent years, several studies have examined the possible spread of this merger to other geographic areas and ethnic groups  (e.g., Vaux 2003,  Fridland 2004, Eberhardt 2008).  These studies, however, are not aimed at determining statistical significance of social factors that might contribute to variation, because they either do not collect necessary demographic information (Vaux 2003) or are not sufficiently large scale (Fridland 2004, Eberhardt 2008).

            In this paper, we present data collected in West Tennessee over a two-year period on the merger of low-back vowels, as in cot and caught.  Our sample of approximately 300 participants allows us to test the progress of the merger in three areas:  (1) whether southerners are as likely as non-southerners to have the low-back merger; (2) whether African Americans and European Americans remain divided in their usage (as suggested by Fridland 2004), or whether they are becoming more similar (as suggested by Eberhardt 2008); and (3) whether younger speakers are more likely than older speakers to have the low-back merger (as suggested by Labov et al. 2006).  If usage is spreading as rapidly in these three areas as our preliminary analysis seems to show, it may be that, contrary to initial expectations, this merger will characterize all of American speech.

Work Cited

Eberhardt, Maeve. 2008. "The Low-Back Merger in the Steel City:  African American English in Pittsburgh."  American Speech (83): 284-311.
            Fridland, Valerie.  2004. "The Spread of the Cot/Caught Merger in the Speech of Memphians: An Ethnolinguistic Marker?" Paper presented at Language and Variation in the South III. Tuscaloosa, AL.  April 15-17.

            Labov, William. 1991.  "The Three Dialects of English."  In New Ways of Analyzing Sound Change. ed. P. Eckert.  New York: Academic Press. 1-44.  Reprinted in Handbook of Dialects and Language Variation, 2^nd ed., ed. by Michael D. Linn.  Academic Press, 1998.  39-81.

            Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg.  2006.  The Atlas of North American English:  Phonetics, Phonology, and Sound Change.  Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

            Vaux, Bert.  2003.  Harvard Survey of North American Dialects.  Available online at http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/index.html.