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Sociolinguistic Patterns in Seattle English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2015

Alicia Beckford Wassink
Alicia Beckford Wassink*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Abstract

Although it was the focus of several publications by Carroll Reed in the 1950s and early 1960s, English spoken in the Pacific Northwestern United States (PNWE) has received minimal research attention in variationist sociolinguistics. This paper provides the first report from an ongoing sociophonetic study. Data from a single-ethnicity, 25-person subsample of the larger corpus, constituted to explore change in apparent time, clarifies Seattleites' use of key markers of Western speech, including merger of cot /a/ and caught /ɔ/, and the positions of all vowel phonemes in the system. Several heretofore unreported characteristic features are found, including a tendency for PNWE speakers to monophthongize /e:/ bake and to raise prevelar /æ/ bag and /ε/ beg toward /e:/.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 31 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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