Back Vowel Dynamics and Distinctions in Southern American English

Southern American English is spoken in a large geographic region the United States. Its characteristics include back-vowel fronting (e.g., goose, foot, and goat), which has been ongoing since mid-nineteenth century; meanwhile, low back vowels (in lot thought) have recently merged some areas. We investigate these five Digital Archive of Speech, legacy corpus linguistic interviews with sixty-four speakers born 1886-1956. extracted 89,367 vowel tokens used generalized additive mixed-effects models to test for socially-driven changes both their relative phonetic placements shapes formant trajectories. Our results reinforce previous descriptions while contributing additional detail about Goose-fronting change progress, greatest after coronal consonants. Goat quite dynamic; it lowers fronts apparent time. Generally, women more fronted realizations than men. Foot largely monophthongal, stable across Lot thought are distinct unmerged, occupying different regions space. While positions generations, all show remarkable consistency trajectory This study’s reveal social details Southerners late nineteenth early twentieth centuries: goose-fronting was well underway, goat-fronting beginning, but foot remained backed, were unmerged.