Pittsburgh = Florence?

David Bergdahl einstein at FROGNET.NET
Fri Oct 8 18:44:40 UTC 2004


I would guess that it's a pronunciation feature, such as the loss of the
glide in /aw/ words like loud, down, sound; Labov says this in the Atlas of
N Amer Eng:
<snip>
At the center of the Western Pennsylvania area is the city of Pittsburgh, a
speech community defined by a unique phonological feature: the glide
deletion of /aw/.[24] A monophthongal realization of the vowel of now, down,
out is not uncommon in Southern England, and is the norm in London working
class speech (Kerswill and Williams 1994, Williams and Kerswill 1999) but it
is not a general characteristic of any other North American dialect. In the
city of Pittsburgh, it is stereotypical of the Pittsburgh dialect, and
pronunciations like "dahntahn" are well recognized as representative of
Pittsburgh (Johnstone et al. 2002). A dozen Telsur speakers outside of
Pittsburgh show occasional monophthongal tokens of /aw/, but these are only
in the most favored environments, before liquids (hour, towel) or in
unstressed function words (out, about).  The gray circles on Map 11.9
indicate glide deletion of /aw/ before obstruents for five of the six
Pittsburgh speakers shown here.
</snip>
Labov's map shows one grey circle in Map 11.9 in Chattanooga, TN so it's not
unlikely the woman has heard steroetypical Pittsburgh /aw/ > /a:/  Does
anyone have data for Florence, SC?



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