pre-velar /ae/ raising (was: slang/slant)

[Joseph Salmons]

Greetings. I've just rejoined ADS-list after being off it for a few
years, partly prompted by hearing about the interesting recent slang/
slant discussion. This 'pre-velar raising' is a topic a few of us
here in Wisconsin are starting to work on, especially Tom Purnell.  I
hope this message doesn't repeat earlier discussion (or steal Tom's
thunder), but here's basically how things are looking to us right now:

/ae/ raising before g (and usually eng/angma and sometimes before k)
can sound like either /ej/ or /E/ to outsiders, and with considerable
variation across speakers. It is creeping into awareness here, in
particular with the word 'bag', which is pretty much a stereotype of
Wisconsin speech for some people. (In addition to the Zeller article,
Labov et al. discuss it at some length in the Atlas, showing the
pattern stretching beyond Wisconsin and Minnesota, but looking
particularly strong here.) One story (I've heard it told by a noted
member of this society, but independently from others too) involves a
newcomer going into a grocery store to buy a loaf of bread and some
milk; he hears the cashier ask “Wanna beg for that?” The newcomer
wonders, “I have to beg? I just paid for it.” (The Wisconsin-oriented
language blogger Mr. Verb, http://mr-verb.blogspot.com/, recently
made a pretty obscure allusion to this pattern in a post, in fact.)
We get /ae/ merging with /ej/ (the vowel of 'bay') for some speakers,
which is what Zeller reports. Still it looks like not all raisers
merge these sounds: Some seem to have the raised /ae/ coming out
close to (maybe identical with) [E], as the perceptual bag/beg
confusion would suggest. (But some people with a good ear vehemently
deny that it ever yields [E].) Some speakers with this pattern also
show really clear lowering of /ej/ before g, including in
disyllabics:  vague, bagel, Reagan, segue, etc. For some, v[ae]gue in
particular is not variable -- it's just how they say that word. My
sense is that this has to be hypercorrection, but we haven't done
much on this yet, or gathered much data (though Tom's doing the
latter right now.)

Matt Gordon raises a number of really good questions about this
process which we have just started to look at data on: Is it related
to NCS? From what we've seen so far, the answer is maybe. Note that
the NCS isn't found as far west as Minnesota, or even western
Wisconsin, where pre-velar raising is widespread. That suggests that
it's a different deal.  Is it phonetically different from NCS? It is
most definitely. Is it older than NCS?  We've looked at /ae/ before /
g/ and alveolars in some DARE recordings from southeast Wisconsin and
the oldest speakers show no raising in either environment. With a few
speakers born somewhat later, we get some suggestive patterns before
alveolars, like NCS (but notably too early for the usual chronology
of that shift), and none before /g/. Later, but still before NCS
should be showing up, we start seeing pre-velar raising. (For the
phonetically inclined: Tom's working out a way of calculating /ae/
raising that gets away from the simple 700 hz threshold that's been
criterial for NCS to date, but that's a topic for a paper by him, not
an ADS-list post. I suspect that Tom's approach allows us to see
earlier stirrings of NCS than the 700 hz measure.) But note that
these historical recordings are from southeastern Wisconsin -- Tom
has suggested in conversation that pre-velar raising could also have
started elsewhere (say, Minnesota) and spread down to meet NCS. If
that's so, it could be older, but then from outside of NCS territory.

We will be working on this for some time to come and hope we'll know
more before too long. Concretely, we should soon have some audio
samples of these patterns on the Wisconsin Englishes Project page,
http://csumc.wisc.edu:16080/wep/.

Oh, finally, Paul Johnston mentioned a possible correlation with
'pop' vs. 'soda', but that line cuts north/south through eastern
Wisconsin, so that we get this 'bag' pattern with 'soda' and 'pop'
speakers up here.

Onward,
Joe
Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures
901 University Bay Drive
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI 53705
http://csumc.wisc.edu/

http://german.lss.wisc.edu/homes/jsalmons/

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org