Mergers in the Mountains

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Mergers in the mountainsWest Virginia division and unification*

Kirk HazenWest Virginia University

This paper examines the status of two vowel mergers in a rural area of the United States. The front-lax merger has traditionally been a southern US merger, and the low-back merger has traditionally been a northern or west-ern US merger. In areas of West Virginia, the same speakers demonstrate both. This geographic overlap of both mergers reinforces the idea that West Virginia is a transitional dialect region. In addition, the traditionally distinct dialect regions of West Virginia are finding increased unity in this overlap of mergers.

Keywords: American English, dialectology, merger, Midland English, variation, vowel

The varieties of English spoken in West Virginia have received little attention with exception of the highly regarded work of Wolfram and Christian (1976). Traditional dialectology studies grant West Virginia two named regions based off of lexical evidence (Kurath 1949), but developments within the language varieties of the state have only been noticed in a few studies, most significantly Labov, Ash and Boberg (fc.). From both earlier lexical data and later phonologi-cal data, the consensus is that West Virginia is a state divided. The predominant

* I hereby recognize support of the Department of English and the Eberly College at West Virginia University, the National Science Foundation (BCS–9982647), and the West Vir-ginia Humanities Council. I received assistance towards the research of this article from numerous people. I want to thank the following for trying to correct my views on vowels and other concepts of dialectological linguistics: Erik Thomas, Susan Tamasi, Charles Boberg, Valerie Fridland, Michael Montgomery, Connie Eble, Nancy A. Niedzielski, Matt J. Gordon, Jennifer Smith, Marianna DiPaolo, Dennis Preston, Edgar Schneider, and the anonoymous reviewers. The remaining defects are my responsibilities.


200 Kirk Hazen

division is between geographically northern and southern West Virginia, al-though the line of demarcation is a matter of debate.

Within the current paper, the data motivate an alternative perspective, one where the dialect regions in West Virginia share previously separate traits. Al-though the artificial state boundaries created in 1863 contained four minor dialect regions, current changes within the state demonstrate that West Virgin-ians are developing increased unity through their shared language variation patterns.

. The geographic region and its dialectological divisions

In recent perceptual dialectological studies, West Virginia is predominantly classified as a non-Northern or Southern area. Benson and Preston (2002) find that Ohio respondents group West Virginia speakers in a single “hillbilly slang” category. In a survey of 30 New Jersey natives and 30 Georgia natives,1 Tamasi (2003) found that 65% of respondents put West Virginia in a grouping with other Southern states: 42% in a large Southern area and 23% in a grouping with another Southern state (partial Southern groupings). Only 15% gave it a Mid-land connection (neither Southern nor Northern) and even fewer, 7%, gave it a northeastern connection.

It appears from such work that nonlinguists have a moderate, although not complete, consensus for West Virginia on the dialect map.2 The traditional dialectological map (Kurath 1949: 91; Kurath and McDavid 1961: 185, see Fig-ure 1) has West Virginia divided into four areas: The northern panhandle is aligned with Pittsburgh in the Upper Ohio Valley; the eastern panhandle is aligned with areas of northern Virginia and western Maryland in the Upper Potomac and Shenandoah Valleys; the north central region is designated its own area with secondary boundary lines, Northern West Virginia, as is the area of Southern West Virginia. At the present time, none of these areas are subject to heavy influence from the Northern Cities Shift (cf. Gordon 1997, 2001). As a whole, West Virginia falls within the Midland region, an often

. There was no significant difference (p > .15) between the response percentages of the New Jersey and Georgia respondents.

2. This problem may be compounded by geographical ignorance. Most people who live in West Virginia have stories about other US citizens who have no idea that West Virginia is a state.


Mergers in the mountains 20

debated dialect region (e.g. Carver 1987; Davis and Houck 1992, 1995; Flani-gan 2000; Flanigan and Norris 2000; Frazer 1993, 1994; Johnson 1994; Murray 2002).3 From its original designation (e.g. Kurath 1949: 27), the Midland has been seen as a nonuniform, transitional region. These findings do not overturn this characterization.

3. Although most dialectologists use the term “Midland”, Carver (1987: 161) employs the term “Midlands” to refer to the Upper South and Lower North.

Figure . Kurath (1949: 91): Major and minor divisions


202 Kirk Hazen

Divisions in West Virginia result from the sociopolitical history of the state. Up until June 20, 1863, West Virginia was simply western Virginia. From the social turmoil of the Civil War, including the events at Harpers Ferry, po-litical activists in the northern areas of the state stumped for secession from Virginia, establishment of independent statehood, and political alignment with the Union cause (Williams 2001). For people near what became the Virginia-West Virginia border, allegiance remained with the Old Dominion and embit-terment was the standard attitude towards those of the northern half of the newly created state. For West Virginia in the twenty-first century, sociocultural malaise remains palpable between the two regions.

From phonological analysis, Labov, Ash and Boberg (fc.) in the Atlas of North American English (ANAE) display a boundary between the South Mid-land and the South which generally coincides with Carver’s (1987) designations. For both maps the isoglossic boundaries run from northeast to southwest. The furthest north reach of the ANAE distinction is Clarksburg, WV. What dif-fers in their assessment is the composition of the Midland region. Labov, Ash and Boberg rejoin a majority of Carver’s Upper South to an all-encompassing South, including the majority of West Virginia. Carver’s (1987) work on lexical items from the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE 1985) primar-ily divides West Virginia between the Upper South, the geographic majority of the state, and the Lower North. The alteration of this division is the expanded area granted to the Upper South (Carver 1987: 161, 165).

2. Methodological approach

Part of the reason for the division in West Virginia has been affinity with other regions. For this reason, two vowel mergers traditionally associated with differ-ent dialect regions were selected to assess trends of synchronic and diachronic variation in West Virginia, and thereby the potential influence on dialect re-gions within the state. The low-back merger (e.g. cot~caught) has traditionally been identified as a feature of Eastern New England, Western Pennsylvania, and the West (Labov, Ash and Boberg fc.), and the prenasal front-lax merger (e.g. pin~pen) has been socioculturally a Southern merger (Brown 1990).

Interviews with 81 Appalachians were collected by the West Virginia Dia-lect Project (WVDP). These interviews usually included three people total to encourage a conversational tone. In terms of topics, all interviews included dis-cussion of the subjects’ home towns, life during childhood, identity as a West



Virginian and/or Southerner, the cultural divide between the southern and northern halves of West Virginia, social cliques in high school, and attitudes about sociolinguistic stereotypes of West Virginia (e.g. lexical items like yonder and phonological stereotypes like monophthongal /aI/ before voiceless obstru-ents). Evaluations of sociolinguistic attitudes in this paper are drawn from the complete subject pool (see Hazen and Fluharty 2004 for more in-depth de-scription). Within this group, 40 West Virginians read a paired word list, the most formal section of the interview. Of the 40 subjects, 29 have had some ex-posure to college within West Virginia and thereby speakers from other dialect regions. All 40 subjects demonstrated typical ranges of variation in their socio-linguistic interviews for their particular social profiles in respect to phonologi-cal variables such as /aI/ monophthongization and grammatical variables such as was regularization. In comparison with the overall subject pool and obser-vation of community members over a six-year period, no evidence from their interviews would mark these speakers as outliers for their communities.

In an attempt to capture conservative stylistic boundaries, the data within this study come from production of word lists. The low-back merger is as-sessed before the phonological environments of /t/ and /k/ only. The word lists contained two pairs: cot / caught, and hawk / hock. The front-lax merger was assessed in two pairs: pin / pen and tin / ten. Each member of a pair was read together (i.e. cot immediately preceded caught) but the pairs were separated by other word pairs. Given the nature of the word list and the arrangement of the word list after the reading passage, all of the subjects were most likely aware that certain sounds were being elicited during this word-list reading.

Other studies, such as ANAE, carefully use auditory analysis to designate a three-way division: merged, distinct, close. This method was observed in the evaluation of tokens, but for the statistical analysis, the distinct and close cate-gories were collapsed, and only the distinction between merged and unmerged (= close + distinct) is reported. With this variant distinction and the choice of data only from the most formal part of the interview, the data reflect the most conservative estimate of the advancement of language change.

Previous studies of vowel mergers in production (Boberg 2001: 19; Bow-ie 2003: 37; Gordon 2000: 119; Thomas 2001: 7) employ auditory analysis of minimal pairs. In addition to auditory analysis, some studies (Boberg 2001; Thomas 2001) perform acoustic analysis to establish the configuration of pho-netic vowel space. The rationale for an auditory analysis of vowel mergers rests in the research question. For an acoustic study, the rationale is to determine


204 Kirk Hazen

the location of the perceptually merged vowel in phonetic vowel space; for the auditory analysis, the question is to determine if the vowels are merged.

For each speaker’s minimal pairs, most tokens were easily discernible be-tween distinct and merged. For those that were not, the pair of words was sub-jected to acoustic analysis to focus on the vocalic segments (minus the con-sonantal edges) and verify the assessment that they were neither distinct nor merged; it is these tokens which fell into the close category.

3. Previous treatments of the front-lax and low-back mergers

The two vowel mergers have traditionally been in geographic complementary distribution in secondary settlement areas. The prenasal front-lax merger of /I/ and /7/ (e.g. pin / pen) has been a Southern feature while the low-back merger of ["] and [f] (e.g. cot / caught) has been a Lower North and Western feature. However, these mergers have no linguistic complementarity with each other: No internal constraints prevent a speaker from having both.

Both of these mergers have been studied extensively, albeit most often in-dependently (e.g. low-back: Herold 1990, Phillips 2004; front-lax: Brown 1991, Thomas 1958, Wetmore 1959, Wise 1933). Some studies assess both mergers. Bowie (2000: 50–1) investigates a community in southern Maryland and finds that some speakers self-report the front-lax merger but that the mean differ-ences between /I/ and /7/ before nasals varies widely. For the low-back merger (Bowie 2000: 61), the community pattern is to maintain a distinction between /"/ and /f/.

These two mergers have been in contact in some other secondary migra-tion areas of the United States. Metcalf (1972) reported the overlap of these two mergers in the central valley of California where both were spreading. Many of the secondary US migration areas between California and West Virginia also demonstrate an overlap of these two mergers, including central and southern regions of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, and the western areas of Kansas and Texas (Labov, Ash and Boberg fc.). All of these areas share a mixed settlement of northern and southern speech. As mergers generally expand at the expense of phonemic contrasts (Labov 1994), these areas gained both the low-back and the front-lax mergers.



3. Low-back merger

Linguistically, the low-back merger is considered an unconditioned merger where both vowels are characterized as back vowels, with /"/ being unrounded and lower and /f/ being rounded and mid. This merger often occurs regardless of linguistic environment, but researchers have found that it is restricted in some linguistic environments for some geographic areas. Thomas (2001: 26) writes, “Linguistic atlas informants from southeastern Ohio and northern West Virginia have /"/ and /f/ neutralized before /t/, but apparently not in other con-texts.” However, it is unclear what phonetic property of /t/ productions would trigger this merger that other voiceless obstruents would not. In addition, so-norants are more often the catalyst in vowel processes than are obstruents.

Thomas (2001: 53) notes the widely reported low-back merger before na-sals. A heightened opportunity for merger would appear to result from the damping effects of nasality on the first oral formant, which make the height of the vowel less certain for listeners. As with many other vowels in English, the prerhotic environment has contributed to merger in words such as card~cord as far west as Utah (Bowie 2003).

The Southern Shift (Fridland 2000, 2001, 2003; Labov 1994) may have an effect on the low-back merger. The fronting of the back vowels normally creates back-glides, the extent of which is regulated by the degree of fronting. If the vowel phoneme /f/ does front, its back-upglide may distinguish it from /"/. In this study, some speakers who do not have the low-back merger demonstrated this difference in their pronunciations of hawk / hock. Fridland (2004) does not find any systematic effect by the Southern Vowel Shift on the progression of the low-back merger through the Memphis community.

Of the two mergers under study, the low-back merger has the most ex-tensive geographic distribution, covering areas across North America. Thomas (2001: 26) writes, “The merger of /"/ and /f/ is found over large parts of North America” and (2001: 61) that it typifies General Canadian English (Avis 1972, Boberg 2000, Kinloch 1983). Canadian English is the only standard variety of English with the low-back merger.4 Kurath and McDavid (1961: 104 and map 15) only report the merger in the northernmost tip of the northern panhandle of West Virginia and not any other portion bordering western Pennsylvania. Of special interest for this study, Labov, Ash and Boberg (fc.) note that the most rapid expansion of this merger is in areas adjacent to western Pennsylvania.

4. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.


206 Kirk Hazen

This expansion includes another West Virginian border state, Ohio, where the merger is present in the north-central region (Hankey 1972; Thomas 2001: 88; Thomas and Boberg fc.). The low-back merger is also advancing in the south-western region of Ohio: Strassel and Boberg (1996) and Boberg and Strassel (2000) note that the low-back merger is spreading in the area of Cincinnati.

3.2 Front-lax merger

Linguistically the front-lax merger is a conditioned merger where both vowels are traditionally front vowels in the nonperipheral track of vowel space. Both are unrounded, but /I/ is usually designated as a high vowel and /7/ as a mid vowel. In the Southern Shift (Fridland 2000, 2001, 2003; Labov 1994), /I/ and /7/ are raising, gaining an off-glide, and moving into the peripheral track of vowel space; however, this alteration does not appear to be affecting whether or not this merger occurs across the Southern US.

Historically, the interaction of /I/ and /7/ before nasals has deep roots in English. Montgomery and Eble (2004: 417) cite evidence from the Old English system of third class strong verbs as well as the transition from OE þencan to Modern English think. For Middle English, Montgomery and Eble cite the raising of /7/ to /I/ before velar nasal plus consonant (e.g. ME hinge from OE henge). They also provisionally claim (2004: 418) that the raising of /7/ to /I/ occurred in non-prenasal environments in the Early Modern English period (e.g. opprision).

Montgomery and Eble’s North Carolina data (2004: 429) “support the view of widespread fluctuation between the vowels in all three types of environment in the eighteenth century”, namely stressed prenasal, unstressed prenasal, and stressed non-prenasal environments.5

The phonetic and/or phonological origin of the front-lax merger remains unknown. Thomas (2001: 52) writes “Its concentration in the South may have to do with the fact that /7/ is generally higher (i.e., with a lower F1) in the South than in the North. This tendency would make F1 of /7/ more susceptible to be-ing canceled by the antiformant and thus would make the first nasal formant into the perceived F1.” However, Boberg (p.c.) notes that the relative distance in phonological space between these two vowels is assumed to be approximately

5. Their evidence comes from written documents in corpora drawn from Stephenson (1958), overseers’ letters (Schneider and Montgomery 2001), and African-American manu-scripts (Montgomery, Fuller and DeMarse 1993).



the same in the North as in the South. In addition, Labov, Ash and Boberg (fc.) have found that prenasal environments were among the most favorable for the lowering of /7/. Boberg (p.c.) also notes that prenasal vowels have not collapsed the way prerhotic vowels have across the English-speaking world, indicating that nasality does not appear to have as consistent a phonetic effect.

Even before non-nasals, some Southern speakers produce tokens of /I/ and /7/ which are perceived to be of the same phonemic value. Montgomery and Eble (2004: 423) find this alternation of these vowels throughout their corpora in non-prenasal environments. From some Southern speakers advanced in the Southern Vowel Shift, bisyllabic productions of pit [phIjt] and pet [ph7jt] may also be interpreted as the same vowel since the prominent up-glide could be the most socially marked feature.6

As to its geographic distribution, Thomas (2001: 52) notes that besides the areas mentioned previously, “The merger of /I/ and /7/ before nasals … is found … in some southerly parts of the Midwest, such as central Ohio (Hartman 1966, Thomas 1995) and Kansas (Labov, Ash, and Boberg forthcoming).” Fla-nigan (2000: 346) claims that this merger is less common than other mergers, such as the low-back merger, in southern Ohio. The sociocultural identifica-tion of the front-lax merger as a regional merger is reinforced by its relative boundedness to the US South, especially in contrast to the geographically far-ranging low-back merger.

For Kurath and McDavid (1961: 103 and Map 9), the vowel of fence (tra-ditionally /7/) was not rendered as /I/ in any area of western Virginia or the state of West Virginia. This pronunciation appears to have been more tightly constrained to the traditional South when the LAMSAS (Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States) speakers were interviewed. However, the vowel of again (1961: 131, Maps 60 and 61) with a pronunciation of /I/ was found in noncultivated speech throughout the east coast, including all of West Virginia, and middle-class speech in West Virginia had predominantly the /I/ pronunciation. In addition (1961: 130), the pronunciation of rinse with /7/ was noted in the cultivated speech of Pittsburgh, PA, and Richmond VA; in folk speech, it was found “throughout the South Midland”. Whether these

6. During public lectures on dialects, I have had speakers read lists of words in order for the audience to discern in what environment the front-lax merger occurs. As part of this endeavor, I pick “good Southern speakers” to read the lists, when possible. When the pre-nonnasal environment list is read, some audience members remark that these vowels sound the same to them; in those cases, the speaker is far advanced in the Southern Vowel Shift.


208 Kirk Hazen

pronunciations were the result of a phonological rule or lexically encoded is unclear.7

Presently, the front-lax merger has a wider range than in the mid-twenti-eth century. However, in contrast to the low-back merger, Boberg and Strassel (2000: 114) do not find the front-lax merger in the Cincinnati area. With the lack of this trait and several other Southern features, they write, “Phonologi-cally, then, natives of Cincinnati proper and its suburbs in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana are North Midlanders or Lower Northerners.”

The front-lax merger can be found in areas historically unassociated with the US South: For example, Newfoundland has a complete merger of /I/ and /7/ in all environments (Colbourne 1982). Brown (1991: 311) infers that, “Two stable, variant pronunciations before nasals, /I / and /7/, were probably brought from Britain by the original settlers of the Atlantic seaboard.” Contrary to Brown (1991), Montgomery and Eble (2004: 420) draw on Krapp (1925), Ste-phenson (1958), and Wyld (1956) to argue that “the two vowels came from the British Isles as highly unstable variants”.

Brown claims further (1991: 307) that in the final quarter of the nineteenth century the front-lax merger gained dominance and completely merged by 1930 in Tennessee (see also Hall 1942 and Pederson 1983). North Carolina had a similar rise in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Brown argues that until this rise in the percentage of front-lax merger speakers the merger was associated with less-educated speech. With changes from below, the exact phonetic or phonological motivations may be impos-sible to trace given their lack of social markedness at the outset of the change: “Changes from below begin as indicators, stratified by age group, region, and social class. At this stage, they show zero degrees of social awareness, and are difficult to detect for both linguists and naïve speakers” (Labov 2001: 196). The social origin of the front-lax merger may correlate with its nativity below the level of conscious awareness. Although it began amongst the lower social classes, Brown (1990: 312) argues that this feature became prestigious in Ten-nessee communities in little more than fifty years.

7. Kurath and McDavid (1961: 131) argue that the status of the word rinse with a mid-front vowel had the same social status in the eighteenth century, citing John Walker (1797): “This word is often corruptly pronounced as if written rense … but this impropriety is daily losing ground.”



3.3 Social distinctions of the mergers

In terms of ethnic distribution, there is a clear split between these two mergers. The low-back merger is much less frequent for African Americans than other ethnicities (Bernstein 1993; Thomas 2001: 174). This trend appears even in the most recent research: Fridland (2004) finds the low-back merger in white speakers, but not among black speakers in her Memphis data. The front-lax merger is a regular language variation pattern for most African Americans and European Americans in the Southern US (Butters 1989: 159; Bailey and Maynor 1987: 13; Thomas 2001: 174). Brown (1991: 309) finds no ethnic association. However, Montgomery and Eble (2004: 431) argue that Brown makes an un-certain proposition because her “earliest data” are from the Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaire, which had data from no African Americans, and because she categorized whites on the basis of their families having had slaves or not, assuming that those who had slaves would show some influence from them. Montgomery and Eble bring forth some evidence that the merger might have shown significant early influence from African Americans.

Another important distinction is the differing social attitudes associated with these two vowel mergers. From reports of both linguists8 and subjects of sociolinguistic interviews, it is reasonable to conclude that in some areas of the South the front-lax merger remains socially unmarked. However, most people in this study who have this merger report having it be the object of comment and ridicule by others. This situation is rarely the case for people who have the low-back merger. A safe assumption is that for many Southerners, and non-Southerners who have had contact with the South, the front-lax merger oper-ates as a sociolinguistic marker, whereas the low-back merger is rarely noted across North America.

4. Vowel mergers in West Virginia

The Telephone Survey of Sound Change in Progress in North American English (TELSUR) (Labov, Ash and Boberg fc.) investigated these two mergers, among other language variation patterns, for nine informants in West Virginia. Table 1 presents selected production and perception data on the low-back merger be-fore /t/ and /k/ and the front-lax merger. The methodology for assessing the

8. Christine Mallinson and Michael Montgomery provided valuable critical analysis of my previous assessment of the sociolinguistic stigmatization of the front-lax merger.


20 Kirk Hazen

vowels was the same as used here. The difference is that for the TELSUR sur-vey the three-way division of variants is reported. Two of the nine subjects had distinctions in both production and perception of the front-lax merger. Four of the nine have both mergers in production and perception for these environments. The people surveyed are predominantly from the southern half of the state, with Clarksburg being the only city falling in Kurath and McDa-vid’s Northern West Virginia area. In contrast to traditional maps of these two mergers, the data in Table 1 is an indication of how much the two mergers now overlap in geographic space.

For these data in Table 1, some of the individual differences may be relat-able to socioeconomic or other societal pressures. People from the southern half of West Virginia report having had their front-lax mergers “corrected” in a school environment, and generally never their low-back mergers. From such indicators, the front-lax merger appears to be socially affiliated with lower so-cioeconomic status and a higher degree of rurality. TS618, for example, who is perhaps the most unmerged in this sample, is an elementary school teacher with 18 years of education; of the four fully-merged subjects, three are a check-er, a service manager at a car dealership, and a repair person, all having had about 12 years of education.9

9. The education and occupation of TS308 was not listed.

Table . Select features from TELSUR informants (Labov, Ash and Boberg fc.)

Low-Back Merger before /t/ and /k/ Front-Lax Mergernumber place age production perception prod. perc.TS561 Clarksburg 39 same same distinct distinctTS292 Charleston 30 same before /t/;

close before /k/same before /t/;distinct before /k/

distinct distinct

TS618 Huntington 42 close before /t/; distinct before /k/

close before /t/; distinct before /k/

close distinct

TS617 Huntington 31 same before /t/;distinct before /k/

same before /t/;distinct before /k/

same same

TS293 Ashland KY 65 same before /t/; close before /k/

distinct before /t/;close before /k/

same same

TS315 Mullens 66 same before /t/ same before /t/ same sameTS316 Charleston 32 same before /t/ same before /t/ same sameTS313 Charleston 42 same before /t/ same before /t/ same sameTS308 Huntington 42 same before /t/ same before /t/ same same

If a cell is “before /t/” only, then the pre-/k/ environment was not assessed.



The data from the WVDP are presented in Tables 2 through 6. They elabo-rate and substantiate some of the trends seen in the TELSUR data. Table 2 gives the data for those people who have the front-lax merger only, those who have the low-back merger only, and those who have both mergers. It should be re-iterated that all of the 19 speakers in the row “both” are fully merged in both mergers, including before /k/ and /t/ for the low-back merger. If those who are “close” or merged were grouped together in Table 2, the percentage would be 50%.10 However, 48% is the conservative estimate of the West Virginia popula-tion who have both mergers. Four people have only the front-lax merger and are somewhat geographically diverse across the state: Three from the southern region and one from the northern portion; two of these are from the same town in southern West Virginia and are African-American. Only four people have the low-back merger exclusively, all of whom are from the northern pan-handle. Of these, no speakers were found to have the low-back merger only before /t/ but not before /k/; one speaker has the low-back merger before /k/

Table 2. Exclusive mergers

I/7 "/fPeople who had either one or the other

4/4010%

4/4010%

before /t/only0/400%

before /k/only1/403%

Both 19/40 48%

Table 3. Ethnicity and mergers

I/7 "/f Both mergerspre /t/ pre /k/ both

African Americans 4/4100%

2/450%

2/450%

2/450%

2/450%

European Americans 28/3678%

29/3681%

24/3667%

21/3658%

17/3647%

0. If “close” judgments were included with merged judgments, the overall rate of the low-back merger would be 62.5%, and 82.5% for the front-lax merger.


22 Kirk Hazen

but not before /t/. These four come from an area of West Virginia directly west of Pittsburgh, PA. Data indicate that the front-lax merger has not made its way to the northern panhandle of West Virginia.

For Tables 3 through 5, the data are divided into three main columns: front-lax, low-back, and both mergers. The front-lax merger column only ac-counts for those speakers who have the front-lax merger (in the numerator); those speakers who are “close” or are distinct are part of the total. The low-back merger column has a tertiary division: The percentages reflect speakers with pre-/t/ and pre-/k/ low-back mergers and a “both” column for speakers who have both pre-/t/ and pre-/k/ low-back mergers. The summary category “both mergers” represents a conservative estimate of how advanced both processes are, i.e. it lists speakers who have the front-lax merger as well as the low-back merger in both environments.

In Table 3, the data are organized by the speaker’s ethnicity.11 Only 10% of the subjects are African-American. Of the entire state population, the African-American population is 3.2%, compared with 12.3% for the nation as a whole. All four African Americans have the front-lax merger. The most considerable difference is made by the four speakers from the Northern panhandle, all of whom are European American; these four are the exclusive low-back merger speakers. For the African Americans, two of the speakers have the low-back merger in both environments, and the two others do not have it at all. For the European Americans, 81% had the merger before /t/, 67% before /k/; the

. The subject pool has 40 speakers: Four African Americans, 35 European Americans, and one Hispanic American of Mexican heritage. For the purpose of this paper, the one Hispanic American is included in the European-American group. This speaker demonstrated vowel mergers in all possible environments.

Table 4. Region and mergers


Northern WV 10/1759%

13/1776%

10/1759%

9/1753%

5/1729%

Southern WV 22/2396%

18/2378%

16/2370%

14/2361%

14/2361%

Chi-Square for front lax: p < .01 (p = 0.003994)Chi-Square for low back: p > .05 (p = 0.616065)Chi-Square for both mergers: p < .05 (p = 0.048893)



intersection results in 58% having the low-back merger in both environments.12 Ethnicity does not appear to significantly correlate with who has which merg-er.13 With larger numbers of speakers, the statistics may change for ethnicity; however, no insights were given by any speakers in the WVDP subject pool to indicate that there is ethnic affiliation with either merger.

More important differences arise when region is analyzed. As suspected, the southern region of West Virginia has a 37% higher and near-categorical rate of the front-lax merger, yet 59% from northern West Virginia also have it. As noted previously, Kurath and McDavid (1961: 103) found no occurrence of the front-lax merger in any area of West Virginia. The immediate implication is that this merger has rapidly expanded. Considering that the northern panhan-dle is an isolate from the rest of northern West Virginia in this merger, ANAE appears justified in drawing the boundary for the south across the Pennsylva-nia border, separating the northern panhandle.

2. In other words, 21 European Americans had the low-back merger in both environments, three others had it before /k/, and eight others had it before /t/.

3. If one ignores the threshold of 5 with the df of 1, then the chi-square results are these:

Chi-Square for front lax: p > .1 (p = 0.291884077)Chi-Square for low back: p > .1 (p = 0.749084688)Chi-Square for both mergers: p > .1 (p = 0.915946328)

△��

○��

●��

Figure 2. Distribution of mergers in West Virginia (speakers who have full mergers)


24 Kirk Hazen

A noteworthy comparison lies between the two mergers for northern West Virginia. Given that northern West Virginia speakers do not identify themselves as Southerners, it is surprising that they have a higher rate of the front-lax merger than the combined rate of low-back merger. Although there are differences between the low-back merger in different environments between northern and southern West Virginians — southern West Virginia demonstrates greater parity and has a higher rate of people who have both — no significant difference exists between them for overall rate of the low-back merger. Of 17 people from northern West Virginia, 10 have the front-lax merg-er: These particular 10 range in age from 18 to 78 and are split evenly by sex. For both mergers, the influence of the front-lax merger, ubiquitous in south-ern West Virginia, lends significance to the column of both mergers, where southern West Virginia has a significant difference from that of northern West Virginia.14 Consider the distribution in Figure 2 where the subset of speakers who are fully merged are displayed.

Table 5. Sex and mergers

I/7 "/f Both mergers pre/t/ pre/k/ both

Females 19/2286%

18/2282%

18/2282%

17/2277%

15/2268%

Males 13/1872%

13/1872%

8/1844%

6/1833%

4/1822%

Chi-Square for front-lax: p > .05 (p = 0.265978)Chi-Square for low-back: p < .01 (p = 0.005163)Chi-Square for both mergers: p < .01 (p = 0.001729)

Table 6. Age and mergers

I/7 "/f Both mergerspre/t/ pre /k/ both

40+ 5/863%

5/863%

3/838%

2/825%

1/813%

< 25 27/3284%

26/3281%

23/3272%

21/3266%

18/3256%

4. Data for this paper does come from two speakers in the middle of the state (Perkins and Philippi, WV, both above Charleston and below Clarksburg). In the overall designation, these speakers were included in the northern half (i.e. non-Southern) by virtue of being



Sociophonetic distinctions do come into play for these mergers. The 32 people who have the front-lax merger do not all produce the same vowels. Some in southern West Virginia are fully participating in the Southern Vowel Shift: The youngest subject, a female aged 14 at the time of the interview in 1999, is quite advanced in the shift. As a general rule, those in northern West Virginia are not participating in the Southern Vowel Shift. Thus, in a wider as-sessment of diachronic variation, these 32 may not be considered to be follow-ing the same paths, but for the front-lax merger, they share a common trait.

Compared to ethnicity or region, the difference between the production of females and males is more significant, below the level of .01 (cf. tab. 5). Women lead in both the front-lax merger and the low-back merger, with a 44% higher rate for the low-back merger. For having both mergers, women lead the way by 46%. Of the three women who do not have the front-lax merger, the two from the northern panhandle do not show any trace of the merger, and the one from Morgantown is close in production. As to the low-back merger, the only two women who were not close in one of the two environments were the two Afri-can Americans from the most southern tip of the state (Bluefield, WV).

In Table 6 the data are divided by the speaker’s age. Although the ages of the speakers sampled range between 14 and 78, they fell into a bipolar distribution (with 32 people 25 or younger and no informants in the age bracket between 25 and 40). Thus, the range of ages was divided into two groups: those below 25 and those over 40. The under–25 speakers have higher rates of merger for every environment. For the older speakers, it appears that the front-lax merger

above Charleston. The speaker from Philippi was fully merged for both mergers and the one from Perkins was merged for the front-lax merger but was close for both environments of the low-back merger.

Table 7. College education and mergers


No College 6/875%

5/863%

3/838%

2/825%

1/813%

College 23/2979%

23/2979%

20/2969%

18/2962%

15/2952%

Chi-Square for front-lax: p > .1 (p = 0.859466321)Chi-Square for low-back: p > .1 (p = 0.342558456)Chi-Square for both mergers: p > .1 (p = 0.385039187)


26 Kirk Hazen

is more well established than the low-back merger. The oldest speaker, aged 78, has the front-lax merger and is close in both environments for the low-back merger.15 In comparing these data with the LAMSAS data, it appears that both mergers are advancing through the population of West Virginia.

A legitimate question is whether the spread of the mergers is affected by social class. An efficient system of socioeconomic indicators has not been de-veloped for West Virginia, but some insight can be gained by looking at those who have or have not attended college. Of the 40 subjects, 29 have attended college16 while 11 have not. The primary difference between these two groups is the extent of the low-back merger: Only 25% of the non-college groups have this merger in both environments compared with 62% of the college group. The same trends hold true here as in the previous tables: The front-lax merger seems to have more participants than the full low-back merger; the pre-/t/ en-vironment is favored over the pre-/k/ environment for the low-back merger. Thus identity and experience with the college environment does not appear to affect production of these two vowel mergers.

5. Discussion

Following Ohala (1989) and Labov (1994), the diachronic variation of the ex-pansion of these mergers is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation. The contemporary synchronic variation in West Virginia suggests a future period where having both mergers is the norm.

5. During the interview, the subject and the interviewer (her granddaughter and a student of mine at the time) discussed the low-back merger in lay terms, including the fact that both the grandmother and granddaughter had the merger.

6. The three subjects who were not of college age (all three merged in all environments) were disregarded in Table 7 as their future is not yet determined. In terms of class expecta-tions and based upon their parental and socioeconomic backgrounds, they can be expected to go to a local college in the future. Merging them with the “college” category would yield a pattern very similar to the age distribution, which makes sense: Older people in the sample and in the area have no association with college while younger ones have some (though this may be a local, two-year college). In addition, even students of the same economic back-ground can have vastly different identity / cultural traits depending on where they go to col-lege: For many, going to a small, “local” state school is much more comfortable than going to West Virginia University. In general, only students who are of middle-middle class back-ground or above attend out-of-state colleges, for both economic and identity reasons. Those subjects who were currently enrolled in college were counted in the College category.



Perhaps an inhibiting factor on the complete overlap of the mergers may reside in their organizational differences. As phenomena on the United States dialect landscape, the two mergers have different levels of complexity. The front-lax merger is most often regarded as a single phonological process. How-ever, speakers demonstrate different levels of the low-back merger depending on the phonological environment.17 For this reason, it is perhaps not a unified change, but a series of interconnected mergers. It may be that differences of social acceptability exist between the pre-/t/ and pre-/k/ environments.

For dialectological concerns, the most robust development is the exten-sion of at least some parts of the low-back merger across the entire region of West Virginia. In parallel, the front-lax merger is common in both the south-ern and northern halves of the state, with the exception of the northern pan-handle; however, it does not appear to be advancing northward with the same fecundity as the low-back merger is advancing south. Yet the important point is that both mergers have advanced across the state in approximately six decades since LAMSAS. A region with both (previously) Southern and non-Southern mergers coexisting lends continued credence to characterizing the Midland as a transitional area.

For the sociolinguistic landscape of the region, the low-back merger does not hamper other important markers of Southern speech, such as /aI/-monoph-thongization or the Southern Shift. In other words, the Southern speakers of West Virginia do not need to alter their sociolinguistic identity in order to adopt the low-back merger. How far north the front-lax merger spreads may depend on its degree of association with a Southern identity; for those non-Southern-ers of northern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania, a merger with strong Southern ties may be unpalatable. Yet the speakers in northern West Virginia who have this merger do not self-identify as Southerners, so perhaps those speakers even further geographically north may not identify it as a re-gionally stigmatized merger. Considering that these northern West Virginia speakers are not participating in the Southern Vowel Shift or other Southern features, perhaps the front-lax merger is insufficient for bestowing a mantle of Southernness.

The two mergers are found within the same speakers throughout a large part of the West Virginia region. As it was 60 years ago, West Virginia is part of the transitional, yet unique, area known as the Midland. Kurath and McDavid (1961: 19) write, “Although the dialect of the South Midland has hardly a single

7. A speaker who is fully merged may not have phonemically different vowels in any part of the lexicon, thus relieving the phonology of the task of that specific merger.


28 Kirk Hazen

feature that does not occur either in the North Midland or the South, we must recognize it as a distinct regional type because of its unique configuration of phonemic, phonic, and incidental features.” In their account of West Virginia, neither the front-lax nor the low-back merger were a part of the dialect; today, both mergers are an important part of this transitional area. Though the spread of these mergers has altered the dialect of the region, dialectological boundar-ies appear relatively unaltered. The impact for language variation in West Vir-ginia is the sociolinguistic profile of the dialect. Previously sociogeographically distinct mergers now are part of the same dialect region. The overlap of these two mergers allows for a unity across traditional dialectological boundaries. West Virginians now have a set of mergers in which they all can share.

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Author’s address

Kirk HazenDepartment of English Box 6296Eberly College of Arts and SciencesWest Virginia UniversityMorgantown WV 26506–6296USA

e-mail: [email protected]

Mergers in the Mountains

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