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A Pronunciation Analysis of an African American Speaker: A Case Study

  • The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea
  • Abbr : 사회언어학
  • 2007, 15(1), pp.195-237
  • Publisher : The Sociolinguistic Society Of Korea
  • Research Area : Humanities > Linguistics

Inhee Jo 1

1선문대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study is an attempt to make a detailed description of the pronunciation features of an African American speaker from Cleveland, Ohio in the U.S.A. Most of the description is devoted to the pronunciation features of the subject's speech even though some lexical and grammatical aspects will also be noted. The present study shows that despite some apparent pronunciation differences, the subject's speech and the Standard American English share essentially the same underlying phonemic inventories. Even though no systematic attempt to associate it with any given social or regional dialect is made, the subject's speech is assumed to belong to the Great Lakes Dialects. The subject's speech was observed to exhibit some influence of the Northern Cities Shift, a chain vowel shift observed in the Great Lakes Dialects, yet, the influence was sporadic lexically: the vowel shift was not complete enough to posit an altered phonemic system for his speech. Granting this, even the limited findings of the present study imply that the subject's speech does indeed exhibit influence of the on-going sound change in the region and makes an excellent material for further study of the gradual sociolinguistic sound change.

Citation status

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