PHONOLOGICAL CORRELATES OF ETHNIC IDENTITY: EVIDENCE OF DIVERGENCE?

Abstract

Like clothing, hairstyles, and other culturally variable phenomena, language offers a wealth of resources on which people may draw to meet their sociosymbolic needs. As a result, linguistic features of all sorts may come to serve as markers of whatever social distinctions are seen as important to a society’s members. Among the distinctions marked in this way are those drawn in terms of broad categories such as gender, social class, and age, as well as others based on categories that may be relevant only in a given community. The research reported here examines the linguistic marking of distinctions constructed by ethnicity. The importance of ethnicity as a social factor shaping variation in American English is hard to deny. The sociolinguistic ramifications of ethnic divisions have been explored in numerous studies and have often been found to involve considerable linguistic differences. This is certainly the case with the best-known—and best-studied—ethnically defined variety in the United States: African American Vernacular English (AAVE), which has been shown to incorporate several linguistic features that distinguish it from vernacular varieties used by European Americans (see, e.g., Bailey and Thomas 1998). Of course, in many American communities, ethnic categorization goes well beyond black and white, and so too may the linguistic marking of these categories. There is value in considering the relationships among a range of ethnically defined varieties, as has been shown in studies conducted by Walt Wolfram and his research team in a North Carolina county populated by roughly equal numbers of speakers of European, African, and Native American descent (see, e.g., Wolfram 1996; Dannenberg and Wolfram 1998). A comparable ethnic complexity exists in the community discussed here, and the present study seeks to examine some of that complexity by sampling speakers representing different ethnic groups. The linguistic correlates of these ethnic categories are examined through a study of phonological variables. A variety of pronunciation