Production of pre-velar /æ/-raising in Colorado and Ontario

Abstract

Pre-velar /æ/-raising (BAG-raising) is a process in which some speakers of North American English raise /æ/ before /g/, but not /k/. Self-report data suggests that this process occurs in Canada and regions of the US close to the Canadian border (Stanley 2022). Acoustic data seems to support this finding, with evidence f or BAG-raising across Canada (e.g. Boberg 2006), and in the Pacific Northwest (e.g. Freeman 2021), the Upper Midwest (e.g. Koffi 2013) and California (e.g. Esposito & Lake 2021) in the US. However, this evidence is somewhat limited, particularly as there is no documentation of BAG-raising (or lack thereof) in regions where it is not expected to occur. The current study adds to our knowledge about the distribution of the production of BAG-raising by acoustically documenting its production in Colorado, where it is not expected to occur and has not been previously studied, and Ontario, where it is expected to occur and has been studied, but not specifically targeted (Boberg 2008; Sullivan 2020a). The results indicate that Ontarians BAG-raise while Coloradans do so little, if at all. Furthermore, there is a fair amount of variation in BAG-raising across participants which cannot be accounted for by region alone.