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Contextualizing /s/ retraction: Sibilant variation and change in Washington D.C. African American Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 January 2022

Kaylynn Gunter ,
Charlotte Vaughn  and
Tyler Kendall
Kaylynn Gunter*
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
Charlotte Vaughn
Affiliation:
University of Oregon & University of Maryland
Tyler Kendall
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated an ongoing change across varieties of English in which /s/ retracts before consonants, particularly before /tɹ/ clusters (e.g., Lawrence, 2000; Shapiro, 1995; Stuart-Smith et al., 2019). Much of this work has focused on the social and linguistic distributions of /stɹ/ within single communities, without an examination of the broader sibilant space (e.g., /s/ and /ʃ/). Meanwhile, analyses across multiple corpora have shown that /s/ and /ʃ/ also show within-community variability, beyond /stɹ/ contexts (Stuart-Smith et al., 2019, 2020). Intersecting these approaches, this paper explores sibilant variation and change across /stɹ/, /s/, and /ʃ/ using a corpus of Washington D.C. African American Language (AAL). Results indicate that /stɹ/-retraction is a stable variant in this variety of AAL and /s/ and /ʃ/ show evidence of socially stratified variation and change. Overall, this paper demonstrates the need to examine the sibilant space more holistically when examining changes in /stɹ/.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , October 2021 , pp. 331 - 357
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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