Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: 1. introduction in 2012, a group of Western U.S. sociolinguists came together for an informal meeting at Stanford University to discuss current research on Western U.S. English dialects.The initiative was an attempt to find ways to align our research interests and encourage more work on the vastly understudied English dialects of this American region.As a result of this meeting, several participants began discussing how to synthesize our work on Western speech and organized a panel at the 2015 meeting of the American Dialect Society in Portland, Oregon.This book and the anticipated second volume to follow are a direct result of this initiative and the research presented at the ADS panel.Our goal here is not only to examine more closely contemporary Western English dialects, but, more importantly, to build on the groundwork laid by Labov, Ash, and Boberg in their impressive Atlas of North American English (2006).The picture so far developed for the Western U.S. consists of both similarities and differences across the region.Simultaneously, however, it is a picture that is still only partially fleshed out, particularly in terms of how the vowel features relevant to a number of U.S. dialects are realized by Western speakers from a variety of ecologically and socially diverse backgrounds.The chapters that follow focus on how a number of regionally defining differences in vowel positions are instantiated in parts of the West with very different migratory histories and, in modern times, with very different senses of place and practice.Owing to a dearth of concentrated sociolinguistic research in this region, knowledge of how extensive and how similar these vowel systems are across the U.S. West has been limited to broad overviews, such as that provided by Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006), or in isolated studies of different aspects of phonology in a few Western states (
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4243849815