Abstract
The Atlas of North American English describes four southern U.S. dialect areas: Inland South (IS; interior Appalachia), Texas South (TS; around Dallas), Florida (FL), and South (S; remainder of Southern US). These areas are distinguished by degree of /ai/ monophthongization, the Southern Vowel Shift’s (SVS) triggering feature (Labov et al., 2006). IS is argued to be most advanced in the SVS, and /ai/ weakens in all phonetic environments. While not as advanced generally, TS also features all-environment weakening. In S, /ai/ weakens only in syllable-final and pre-voiced conditions, and in FL it remains diphthongal. This study uses the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) to acoustically measure /ai/ weakening in each region. Speech was force-aligned and F1 and F2 values collected at five time points. Related work on F2 formant angle in DASS speech has suggested /ai/ weakens most in IS (Renwick and Stanley, 2017). Here, trajectory length (TL) measurement (Fox and Jacewicz, 2009) corroborates evidence f...
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