"Oh [o:], I'm the token Asian" A potential vowel marker of ethnic identityNWAV 43

Carina Bauman

New York University

The GOAT vowelWhat I’m finding: some Asian American women in the Mid-Atlantic U.S. are using a pronunciation of the mid back rounded vowel (i.e., /o/ or GOAT) that is distinct from prevailing regional norms

Backed: Contrasts with a general trend toward GOAT-fronting in many dialects of American English

Monophthongal: Contrasts with diphthongal realization of GOAT as [oʊ] in most American English dialects

Notable exception: Upper Midwest

o

GOAT-frontingAs reported by The Atlas of North American English, the fronting of GOAT is a widespread change in progress, with the Mid-Atlantic region the most advanced, and the North and Canada maintaining a conservative, back position (Labov et al. 2006, p. 157).

Fronted GOAT has been well documented as a feature of Philadelphia English (Labov 1980, 2001; Labov et al. 2013)Part of the California or Western Vowel Shift (Hinton et al. 1987; Eckert 2008; Hall-Lew 2009)

Part of “surfer” and “Valley Girl” stereotypes (along with fronted GOOSE)

GOAT and ethnicity:Hall-Lew 2009: GOAT is fronting in San Francisco; Asian Americans may be leading European Americans in the changeEberhardt 2009 (NWAV 38): African Americans in Pittsburgh front GOAT similarly to WhitesNiedzielski 2013 (NWAV 42): White Houstonians front GOAT; Chinese American and African Americans don’t

Linguistic conditioningFronting is inhibited before /l/

GOAT vs. GOAL

Unlike GOOSE, GOAT is minimally affected by preceding consonant

GOOSE GOAT

Atlas map of GOAT-fronting

Atlas continued

Red = frontedBlue = non-fronted

Current study: Speakers & data15 Asian American sorority members at a large public university in New Jersey

Data come from sociolinguistic interviews (~1 hr) conducted as part of an ethnographic study of the sorority

Collected in early 2014

7 non-Asian female college students in NYC

Data come from a sentence-reading task in a phonetics study (not about GOAT)

Collected in May 2012

All are native speakers of English (spoke English before age 10)

Purple = AsAmRed = non-Asian

Atlas isogloss

Current study: Speakers & dataAd-hoc comparison of sentence-reading with interview speech

Little evidence for overt social awareness/evaluation of this vowel; no reason to suspect speakers would self-monitor GOAT pronunciation

Vowel tokens under 40 ms were excluded

Formant measurements were taken at 25% into the vowel

Reported formant values were normalized using the NORM web tool, with the LabovANAE Telsur G option

What’s it sound like?

Fronter Backer

‘open’KH

‘so’CL

‘so’BC

‘go’SC

‘clothes’KM

‘hosting’AS

‘clothes’VP

‘so’MQ

Mean F2 (normalized) for all GOAT (excluding GOAL)Speaker Age (2014) Hometown Ethnicity Mean F2 N

SC 22 NYC Chinese 1460 Hz 25

MQ 21 NYC Chinese 1368 51

RC 21 NYC Chinese 1474 28

GZ 22 NYC Chinese 1430 46

JO 21 North NJ Korean 1442 38

LJ 21 North NJ Chinese 1464 34

BC 23 Central NJ Chinese 1440 34

TN 21 Central NJ Vietnamese 1446 38

MN 21 Central NJ Vietnamese 1468 41

AL 22 Central NJ Chinese 1453 23

CL 21 Central NJ Chinese 1430 33

JN 21 South NJ Vietnamese 1492 31

VP 21 South NJ Vietnamese 1500 47

LC 22 South NJ Korean 1430 30

HX 24 Delaware Chinese 1564 29

Avg 1457 Hz 528

Speaker Age (2012) Hometown Mean F2 N

KH 20 Upstate NY 2017 8

TT 21 NYC 1664 8

AK 21 Long Island, NY 1687 8

BS 22 Long Island, NY 1544 8

AD 21 North NJ 1569 8

AS 21 Central NJ 1724 8

KM 22 Philadelphia 1872 8

Avg 1725 Hz 56

NYC

Philly

Higher F2 = fronter GOAT

Group averagesGroup Vowel N F1' F2'

Sor GOAT 528 724 1457

Sor GOAL 32 639 1010

Con GOAT 56 684 1730

Con GOAL 32 633 1297

GOATF (1, 582) = 66.2, p < .001

GOALF (1, 62) = 20.9, p < .001

Individual averages

Mono-/diphthongal quality: Difference scores

Nguyen (2011) studied monopthongal /o/ in Minnesota; developed a quantitative measure that correlates with perceptual judgments

Total Difference = (F2offset – F2onset)/2 + (F1offset – F1onset)

Mono-/diphthongal quality

On average, AsAm speakers (M = -104.8) show about 30% less movement in GOAT than non-Asian speakers (M = -149.5).

F (1, 646) = 5.4, p = .02

Average difference scores by speaker

-250

-200

-150

-100

-50

0

JN AS SC AK TT MN RC BS JO HX KH AD KM GZ LJ AL CL VP TN LC BC MQ

Metalinguistic awareness

Speaker LC (from Egg Harbor Township, NJ), talking about her younger brother:

“And um · he kinda talks like · I'm tryin to think- Do you know what a South Jersey accent is? · Like · uh me and my sister we don't have any sort of South Jersey accent or anything like that · and then like, we would just like pronounce words the way · it's supposed to be pronounced, I dunno know how to explain it, but my brother's like very into · slang · all that stuff. Or- · so like · So the /o/s in · I guess like in South Jersey accent's VERY · I guess, exaggerated? · So: · If I say, "Oh, I'm gonnarow a boat" · he'd say, "Oh, ROW" · "a BOAT" · (laugh) or "HelLO:", that kinda thing.”

Meanwhile…

Chun (2009) mentions backed, monophthongal /o/ as a feature of Mock Korean English

These findings suggest it may index Asianness more generally

That the Asian speakers in this study resist GOAT-fronting contrasts with Hall-Lew (2009), who finds that Asian Americans in a San Francisco neighborhood show change in apparent time toward fronted GOAT, while European Americans don’t.

Together, these findings suggest that research on regional sound change needs to take into account the interrelationship of place and ethnic identity—what it means to sound “local”, “Asian”, etc., depends on the specific local context.

Thank you

My dissertation committee, especially Greg Guy, Sonia Das, and John Singler, for their input.

Lauren-Hall Lew and Amy Wong for many helpful comments and inspiring conversations.

The members of the NYU Socio Lab for their feedback and support.

My speakers for sharing their voices with me.

ReferencesChun, Elaine (2009). Ideologies of legitimate mockery: Margaret Cho's revoicings of Mock Asian. Beyond Yellow

English: Toward a linguistic anthropology of Asian America, ed. by A. Reyes & A. Lo, 261-287. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eberhardt, Maeve (2009). Back Vowel Fronting in Pittsburgh AAE. Paper presented at NWAV 38, Ottawa, Canada.Hall-Lew, Lauren (2009). Ethnicity and phonetic variation in a San Francisco neighborhood. PhD dissertation,

Stanford University.Hinton, Leanne, Sue Bremner, Hazel Corcoran, Jean Learner, Herb Luthin, Birch Moonwomon, and Mary Van Clay

(1987). It’s not just Valley Girls: A study of California English. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13, 17-127.

Labov, William (1980). The social origins of sound change. Locating language in time and space, ed. by William Labov, 251–66. New York: Academic Press.

Labov, William (2001). Principles of linguistic change, vol. 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg (2006). Atlas of North American English: Phonology and sound

change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Labov, William, Ingrid Rosenfelder, and Josef Fruehwald (2013). One Hundred Years of Sound Change in

Philadelphia: Linear Incrementation, Reversal, and Reanalysis. Language 89(1), 30-65.Niedzielski, Nancy (2013). Chinese American English vowel variants: evidence for an emerging Anglo identity?

Paper presented at NWAV 42, Pittsburgh, PA.Nguyen, Emily (2011). The urban/rural distinction: Monophthongal (ow) in Minnesota. Ms., New York University.Nguyen, Emily (2011). The urban/rural distinction and so much more: Monophthongal (ow) in Minnesota. Paper

Presented at NWAV 40, Washington, D.C.Thomas, Erik R. and Tyler Kendall. 2007. NORM: The vowel normalization and plotting suite. [Online Resource:

http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu/tools/norm/]