The Sociophonetic And Acoustic Vowel Dynamics Of Michigans Upper Peninsula English Wil A Rankinen by Wil A. Rankinen instant download after payment.

The present sociophonetic study examines the English variety in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) based upon a 130-speaker sample from Marquette County. The lin- guistic variables of interest include seven monophthongs and four diphthongs: 1) front lax (i.e., /I, E, æ/), 2) low back (i.e., /A, O/), and 3) high back vow- els (i.e., /U, u/) and 4) short (i.e., /ej, ow/) and 5) long diphthongs (i.e., /Aj, Aw/). The sample is stratified by the predictor variables of heritage-location, bilingualism, age, sex and class. The aim of the thesis is two fold: 1) to deter- mine the extent of potential substrate effects on a 71-speaker older-aged bilingual and monolingual subset of these UP English speakers focusing on the predictor variables of heritage-location and bilingualism, and 2) to determine the extent of potential exogenous influences on an 85-speaker subset of UP English monolingual speakers by focusing on the predictor variables of heritage-location, age, sex and class. All data were extracted from a reading passage task collected during a sociolinguistic in- terview and measured instrumentally. The findings of this apparent-time data reveal the presence of lingering effects from substrate sources and developing effects from exogenous sources based upon American and Canadian models of diffusion. The lin- guistic changes-in-progress from above, led by middle-class females, are taking shape in the speech of UP residents of whom are propagating linguistic phenomena typically associated with varieties of Canadian English (i.e., low-back merger, Canadian shift, and Canadian raising); however, the findings also report resistance of such norms by working-class females. Finally, the data also reveal substrate effects demonstrating cases of dialect leveling and maintenance. As a result, the speech spoken in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula can presently be described as a unique variety of English comprised of lingering substrate effects as well as exogenous effects modeled from both American and Canadian English linguistic norms.