AAE /hw/

[Dennis R. Preston]

In an earlier posting Wilson asked about region and age as regards
African-American users of the /hw/ - /w/ contrast. None of our AA
respondents from the Lansing-Detroit area (some quite old) have this
distinction, and I would not be surprised if it is not a
regionally-based rather than ethnically-based phenomenon (as, for
example, low-front vowel raising is here in Michigan). For example,
many younger AA speakers participate in that (regionally) while they
avoid /a/-fronting (a regional feature which appears to be sensitive
to race). We have plenty of evidence of such phenomena. For example,
AA speakers in Philadelphia avoid the fronting of the onset to the
/aw/ diphthong even though it is a very strong regional feature.

What several of us grubbing sociolinguistics have tried to do in many
such studies is tease out these features which, almost arbitrarily it
would seem, are "selected" (and I imply no overt consciousness in
this of course) as symbolic of regional identity but are made complex
if they seem to intrude on ethnic identity. Jamila Jones' recent MSU
dissertation, for example, establishes that quite elegantly for local
AA speakers' use of /ae/ raising (regional identity) and avoidance of
/a/fronting (ethnic identity), giving rise to what she describes as a
front-vowel-only Northern Cities Shift. In contrast, Bridget
Anderson's recent work in Detroit suggests that AA speakers' contact
with lowland Appalachians in the early car-industry immigration
caused the local AA speakers to extend /ay/ monophthongization to the
usually prohibited environment (except among Appalachians) of
prevoiceless consonants (e.g.,"nighttime" is "nahttahm," not
"naittahm"). In this case, a perceived southern feature spread on the
basis of what one might call "displaced regional identity."

On the /hw/-/w/ topic, I suspect that the heaviest enclaves of
/hw/-/w/ distinguishing would be those which reflect the highest
percentage of Scottish, Scotch-Irish, and North of England speakers,
groups more typical of the upland rather than plantation south. If
that is so, then this distinction might very well have been
associated with white ("hillbilly") speech and in many areas avoided
by AA speakers, even if it was strong regionally. Since the largest
percentage of AA speakers would perhaps not have had this distinction
originally, that would mean that only a few AA speakers in regions
which supported the distinction (e.g., Louisville, St. Louis, maybe
Cincinnati) as a result of lowland Appalachian speech influences
might have acquired the distinction as a regional phenomenon which
did not intrude on ethnic identity. Jill Goodheart's recent work in
St. Louis, although it did not treat this phenomenon, showed no
evidence of /hw/ - /w/ in the white community, and my work in
Louisville shows that the distinction there is alive only among 50+
year olds (and not all of them).

dInIs (who as a result of this speech handicap misunderstood a
younger colleague who said 'white' to have said 'wide' just yesterday)
--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic,
        Asian and African Languages
Wells Hall A-740
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
Office: (517) 353-0740
Fax: (517) 432-2736