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Jan. 5th, 2012 10:44 am
Farty harses
You know it's a good vacation when you get to explain the Northern Cities Vowel Shift to friends and family not once but twice. Naturally, my St Louis relatives aren't aware of how the second formant has been dropping for their /ɑ/ vowels, but this is something I keep an ear out for. I'm always ready to tease ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu, for instance, any time his "top" sounds too much like "tap".
Most regional variation in English is confined to the vowels and the easiest way to sketch a dialect is to outline the mergers and splits among its lexical sets, something I learned about from reading John C. Wells' Accents of English. Just knowing, for instance, that my speech has the pin-pen and hurry-furry mergers but not cot-caught and has /ɔn/ for on rather than /ɑn/ gives you a pretty good idea what part of the country I'm from. But, of course, features like these don't necessarily remain static, even when (unlike me) you do stay in one place.
One of the defining features of the St Louis accent, for instance, used to be the merger of /ɑr/ with /ɔr/ rather than /or/. Or, to put it in terms of lexical sets, it had the card-cord merger rather than the horse-hoarse one. This is the source of the city's most celebrated shibboleth, "Highway Farty" for US40 (now I-64). Sadly, my recent trip confirmed that it's on the way out. I had a good chat with my mother's eldest brother at the family Christmas dinner and heard him say not only "farty" but also "arder" and "arganisation". I only consistently have it in the name of Forest Park (St Louis' answer to Central Park in NYC) and my nephews don't seem to have it at all.
In general, it feels like my vowels are collapsing before coda /r/. This is part of a larger tendency in English; only some Irish and Scottish accents really preserve a full range of vowels in this position. I can make the marry-merry distinction when need be (and I do in the names of New York friends, like Barry from Queens), but that's a learned affectation. In my natural speech, I not only have horse-hoarse but also pour-poor. Nuphy even accused me of merging /ɔr/ with /ʌr/ in some cases, so he couldn't tell whether I was talking about "shorts" or "shirts".
monshu, for instance, any time his "top" sounds too much like "tap".Most regional variation in English is confined to the vowels and the easiest way to sketch a dialect is to outline the mergers and splits among its lexical sets, something I learned about from reading John C. Wells' Accents of English. Just knowing, for instance, that my speech has the pin-pen and hurry-furry mergers but not cot-caught and has /ɔn/ for on rather than /ɑn/ gives you a pretty good idea what part of the country I'm from. But, of course, features like these don't necessarily remain static, even when (unlike me) you do stay in one place.
One of the defining features of the St Louis accent, for instance, used to be the merger of /ɑr/ with /ɔr/ rather than /or/. Or, to put it in terms of lexical sets, it had the card-cord merger rather than the horse-hoarse one. This is the source of the city's most celebrated shibboleth, "Highway Farty" for US40 (now I-64). Sadly, my recent trip confirmed that it's on the way out. I had a good chat with my mother's eldest brother at the family Christmas dinner and heard him say not only "farty" but also "arder" and "arganisation". I only consistently have it in the name of Forest Park (St Louis' answer to Central Park in NYC) and my nephews don't seem to have it at all.
In general, it feels like my vowels are collapsing before coda /r/. This is part of a larger tendency in English; only some Irish and Scottish accents really preserve a full range of vowels in this position. I can make the marry-merry distinction when need be (and I do in the names of New York friends, like Barry from Queens), but that's a learned affectation. In my natural speech, I not only have horse-hoarse but also pour-poor. Nuphy even accused me of merging /ɔr/ with /ʌr/ in some cases, so he couldn't tell whether I was talking about "shorts" or "shirts".
