Race, place, and education: Charting the wine-whine merger in the US South

Abstract

Over the past century, the wine-whine merger has transitioned from a localized regional feature to a nearly ubiquitous characteristic of US English, a pattern of language change whose social correlates have largely gone unexplored. The present study draws from the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (Kretzschmar et al. 2013), a database of 64 linguistic interviews collected 1970-1983, to analyze the distribution of [hw] and [w] across social and linguistic variables within a time and place where [hw] was still common. Results reveal that while all speakers exhibited variation between [hw] and [w], with content words exhibiting [hw] at higher rates than function words, intra-speaker variation remained stable across apparent time for White speakers, suggesting that the wine-whine merger had not yet reached the US South. However, [hw] use sharply declined among Black speakers over the same period, demonstrating a divergence from the local White varieties corresponding to a changing cultural landscape. Variation in [hw] also occurs across sub-regions of the South. Finally, college-educated speakers were more likely to use [hw], suggesting that this variable should be interpreted as a prestige feature that persisted in the South.