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Julie Roberts Professor and Director, Linguistics Program Department of Romance Languages & Linguistics President, Faculty Senate 335 Waterman 802 656-7928 [log in to unmask] On Oct 9, 2014, at 11:29 AM, Gregory R Guy <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > I can't think of studies at the moment, but I've observed this for years in my own family. Due to my moving around from job to job, my kids have had a highly varied set of dialect inputs from their peers. The older one was born in Australia, after which he has lived (for periods ranging from 1-2 years to more than 10) in Philadelphia, Ithaca NY, Palo Alto CA, and Toronto Canada (all before the age of 10), and since then in New York City and Vancouver. His mother and I are both Philadelphia natives, but he has mostly adapted to his peers wherever we went. > > During childhood and adolescence he put on Aussie characteristics (e.g vowels, non-flapping of intervocalic /t/), then Northern AmEng (e.g. tensing all /æ/ tokens), then California, and then Canadian (e.g., low back vowel merger). In each local he abandoned characteristics of the previous dialect region that conflicted (at some degree of saliency) with the new one. > > The younger one only began language acquisition in California, moved to Canada at age 6, and more or less immediately and definitively Canadianised. He's got Canadian out/about with raised nuclei, and the Canadian lax vowel shift. > > Of particular note is the Canadian low back vowel merger. My older son reliably produced this distinction as a young child (consistent with his parents, Oz, and Ithaca inputs). He continued to produce it in Canada for about 6-8 years, then started merging them. I had him read a wordlist for me when he was 17, and he pronounced all the words merged. When I expressed surprise, he said, 'oh, you want me to say:' and then he read them all off with the phonemic contrast between cot and caught. I said 'that's how you used to pronounce them.' His reply was, 'yeah, I can do that, but why would you want to?' I think this is a crucial observation for accommodation to the dialect around you. What good is it, communicatively or socially, to use features of a different dialect? > > My conjecture is that his underlying phonemic entries date to early childhood, and encode the low back distinction, but his adult productions (at least when he's in Canada) are merged, evidently by a late phonological rule. > > Greg Guy > > On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Dave Sayers <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Dear Variationisers, > > One of my BA dissertation students is planning to conduct interviews within families, recording their speech and probably also conducting some semi-structured interviews with them, at a later time, about their dialect usage and differences between the generations of their family. Now, walk into any collection of sociolinguistic research and you'll immediately be tripping over studies of intergenerational dialect differences within communities, but variation within individual families... that I'm not so sure is very well covered. I recall Paul Kerswill and Eivind Torgersen's 2004 article in JoS referencing James Hurford's 1967 PhD thesis examining one East London family's language use. I've also since found this paper http://goo.gl/JwQfl3, which isn't quite what I'm after but does have useful discussions of the role of family. There's a fair bit of research within families discussing language *shift*, but not as much (that I can find) about dialect variation. Surely this has had more coverage... Anyone? Ideally I'm looking for stuff on British English dialects, but from a general methodological and theoretical point of view, studies from anywhere would be useful. > > Please reply to me off the main list and I'll report back with the responses. > > Thanks, > Dave > > > -- > Dr. Dave Sayers > Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, UK > Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University, UK > [log in to unmask] | http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers > > ######################################################################## > > The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics. > > To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to: > [log in to unmask] > > To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link: > https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1 > > > > -- > Gregory R. Guy > Department of Linguistics > New York University > > "It is only through an analysis of variation that the reality and meaning of a norm can be established at all." -Edward Sapir, 1938 > > The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics. > > To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to: > [log in to unmask] > > To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link: > https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1 > ######################################################################## The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics. To send messages to the VAR-L list (subscribers only), write to: [log in to unmask] To unsubscribe from the VAR-L list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VAR-L&A=1