Acoustic Analysis and Language Attitudes in Detroit

In his 1989 paper on Canadian dialects, Jack Chambers says he fears the demise of "the most distinctly Canadian sound the source of the "aboot the hoose comments [or Canadian Raising] from Canadian English." Chambers is referring to the fact that Canadians seem to have replaced the Raising Rule with a Fronting Rule, so that the segments he is referring to (i.e. /awl) now tend to be pronounced not as [~>v], but as [mv]. In this paper, it will be shown that while this may the case in Canada, speakers on the other side of the international borderspecifically, those in Detroit, Michiganare in fact Raising. Furthermore, while there is Canadian Raising in Detroit, speakers in that area remain unaware of its existence; many speakers continue to think of the phenomena of pronouncing /aw/ as [1>v] as a distinctly Canadian feature. It will be shown below that it is Detroit women in particular that hold this belief, and in fact are more likely to themselves raise the onset of this diphthong than the men in their community. Many Detroit men, in contrast, seem unaware of Raising in any population. Finally, it will be suggested that this disparity between the sexes in Detroit is a canonical case of women leading change from below, and confirms the findings from Dailey-O'Cain (1995), which examined this variable in Ann Arbor, Michigan.