Title

This is a variationist study investigating the monophthongization of /ai/ in Southern U.S. speech in relation to the linguistic expression of identity.  The latter has in the past been examined principally by qualitative studies (see Bucholtz 1999; Eckert 2003; Johnstone 1997), the present study essays to level the accuracy and descriptive value of qualitative research in a quantitative setting by rendering a traditionally qualitative variable ("identity") quantitatively accessible.  To this end, a scoring system for "regional identity" was innovated.

             Data collection consisted of sociolinguistic interviews.  Twenty-six interviews were recorded.  Interviews consisted of two parts.  In the first part, interview subjects were encouraged to talk about their lives.  The second part of the interview concentrated on eliciting the subjects' opinions regarding the local region, the American South and Midwest, and how they relate to these.

            Tapes were reviewed and coded for tokens of /ai/ and its variants.  Excluding the first five minutes of each interview, the first fifty tokens were coded for each informant.  Each token was coded for stress, tautosyllabicity and following environment.

            Tapes were also reviewed for information regarding the informant's expression of regional identity – i.e. their expression of identity as informed by geographical region and the associated culture.  A scoring system was devised which used emic criteria taken from each interview individually to assign positive or negative point values to statements made by the informant in that interview, with the result that each informant generated a score for Southern and Midwestern categories as well as a final regional score.  For example, if an informant described the South as being more politically conservative than the Midwest, then stated that he/she prefers that political climate, the informant scored +1 South.  The crucial factor is that criteria were defined by individual informants, not by the researcher.  If an informant simply described the South as politically conservative, the informant would score no points, whether or not that informant appeared to the researcher to prefer such.

            With the assumption that a person may only principally identify with a single region, final regional scores were obtained by subtracting the lower score from the higher. For this purpose, negative scores were treated as 0.  The final regional score could be expressed as an overall Midwestern, Southern, or Neutral (score of 0) identity.  These scores were then used along with language internal factors defined above for statistical analysis.

            Distributional and multivariate analyses were performed.  It was found that males lead in monophthongization and glide reduction, demonstrating a 54.6% likelihood of Southern speech form use for all tokens, while females showed 45.4% (p < 0.010).  Males espousing a Southern identity used Southern forms most  at 63% likelihood, followed by Southern females' 56.3% (p < 0.000).  There was a gendered, regional hierarchy of Southern forms, such that Male Southern > Male Neutral > Male Midwestern (repeated for females), where factors to the left display a higher likelihood of Southern forms.  These results support the validity of the quantified scoring system, which is promising for future quantitative/qualitative research.

References:

Bucholtz, Mary.  1999.  You da man: Narrating the racial other in the production of white masculinity.  Journal of Sociolinguistics 3 (4).  443-460.

Eckert, Penelope.  2003.  The Meaning of Style.  Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Symposium about Language & Society.  Austin: Texas Linguistic Forum 47: 41-53.

Johnstone, Barbara.  1997.  Southern Speech and Self-Expression in an African-American Woman's Story.  In C. Bernstein, T. Nunnally & R. Sabino (Eds.). Language Variety in the South Revisited.  87-97.