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California Vowel Shift
Okay. So I'm from California (Southern California Native to be exact. Near San Diego.)
On this forum, a lot of people have brought up the California Vowel Shift. I don't know if this has been answered already, if so, lead the way! What IS the California Vowel Shift?
I'm not an expert on this (Kirk would know much more about it than I do), but it's a shift of vowels currently occurring in California, including, I believe, changes like [A]-->[O], [{]-->[a], [E]-->[{], [I]-->[E], and [u]-->[M]/[1]. I've gotten the impression that the extent of the merger can vary considerably from speaker to speaker, with the most progressive form being commonly referred to as the "Valley Girl accent".
Well, I guess an approximation of those changes in pseudo-phonetic English orthography might be:
mom > mawm that > thaht bet > bat bit > bet cool > kewl But to convey accurate phonetic information, you really need to use X-SAMPA ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA ) or IPA ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA ). My previous post used X-SAMPA.
Vowel shifts are tiny changes in pronunciation that linguists like to look for and document. They often are not noticeable to normal people.
For the rest of the world, people from SoCal sound like Americans from just about any other part of the U.S.; that is, they speak a standard English that isn't particularly distinctive. The only noticeable accents in the U.S. are in the South and a few small areas such as New York City.
<<Vowel shifts are tiny changes in pronunciation that linguists like to look for and document.>>
Vowel shifts are not defined as "tiny". They are defined as "shifts of vowels" (duh@) and they are often quite distinctive and noticeable. The California/Valley Girl Shift and the NCVS are often noticed by laypeople and referenced or made fun of in pop culture. <<They often are not noticeable to normal people.>> I'm guessing that by your standards, I probably wouldn't be normal. <<The only noticeable accents in the U.S. are in the South and a few small areas such as New York City.>> That's a gross misconception if I ever heard one. What is your gripe against linguists anyway? Believe it or not, there is indeed a world of meaningful linguistic inquiry beyond ESL/EFL teaching.
<<Okay. So I'm from California (Southern California Native to be exact. Near San Diego.)
On this forum, a lot of people have brought up the California Vowel Shift. I don't know if this has been answered already, if so, lead the way! What IS the California Vowel Shift?>> April, this article has an introduction to the California Vowel Shift: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_English Just curious, where are you from in the San Diego area? I go to UCSD. Seeing as the California Vowel Shift is most prevalent in younger speakers' speech I hear influence of the CVS everyday here in my speech and that of others my age. Mxsmanic has it half right--people going thru chain shifts rarely notice the changes since they've subconsciously come to expect hearing the new vowel positions, but for dialects not going thru said shifts the changes are apparent. When I've been outside California I've had some people comment on my California accent which I suspect is at least partly due to CVS influences on my vowels. One girl specifically commented on my pronunciation of "yeah," and I noticed my realization of the vowel had been closer to /a/ than /{/, which is consistent with the California Vowel Shift.
<<Vowel shifts are not defined as "tiny". They are defined as "shifts of vowels" (duh@) and they are often quite distinctive and noticeable. The California/Valley Girl Shift and the NCVS are often noticed by laypeople and referenced or made fun of in pop culture.>>
Yup. The girl I mentioned above who commented on my "yeah" knows nothing about linguistics and is not interested in such matters but in the course of conversation my pronunciation of it was apparently salient enough for her to notice it and associate it with a California accent. This is one of Mxsmanic's many weak points in that many linguistics-unoriented people can reliably pick out dialectal features that are different from theirs (and I'm not talking about the traditional ones like NYC, Boston, or the South, but the Northern Cities Vowel Shift or the California Vowel Shift). <<They often are not noticeable to normal people.>> Once again, an abundance of non-linguistics oriented people *can* and *do* notice such differences. They may or not be able to pinpoint the specific differences or have any clue about the nature of chain shifts but they instinctually know a different accent when they hear one and can tell you it just sounds "different." <<The only noticeable accents in the U.S. are in the South and a few small areas such as New York City.>> Hahaha. That's awesome. That's almost like the infamous "English has three dialects; Cockney, Queens and Scots" comment by a certain other poster here. <<What is your gripe against linguists anyway? Believe it or not, there is indeed a world of meaningful linguistic inquiry beyond ESL/EFL teaching.>> Mxsmanic doesn't deal beyond that world, as he's made clear in his comments. Earlier he's also claimed several times that he's not interested in the matters that don't specifically deal with ESL/EFL here so the fact that he responded to this one is odd. Doesn't deal with you, specifically, Mxsmanic? Save us all a lot of trouble and time and don't respond to it. Either that or get used to people pointing out factual errors in your comments for these topics you've somehwhat unexplainedly decided to plunge into. |