Abstract

The realization of interdental fricatives as coronal oral stops, referred to as interdental-stopping, is often attributed to substrate effects of ethnicity and immigrant-heritage. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) is an excellent case to examine this feature’s complex variation within bilingual and monolingual older-aged cross-sections of a rural immigrant speech community. To what degree, if any, is interdental-stopping occurring among Michigan’s UP Finnish and Italian-heritage speech communities? Interdental-stopping has been documented in UP English [3, 2], but only a more recent report has provided any quantitative account that tracks this salient feature and its sociophonetic trends within the community [1]. The present study examines this feature among 41 Finnish-Americans and 30 Italian-Americans, whom are all older-aged residents from Michigan’s Marquette County. Both samples are stratified by gender, socioeconomic status and lingua-dominance. All data is obtained from a reading passage task. This s...

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