Regional Patterns in Prevelar Raising

Abstract

Prevelar raising is the raising of trap and dress vowels before voiced velars. While bag and beg raising have been described in Canada, the Upper Mid-west, and the Pacific Northwest, an in-depth investigation of their distribution across North America is lacking, especially for beg. Using an online survey distributed to over 5,000 participants via Reddit (which skews toward younger, White males) and ordinary kriging for spatial interpolation, this study finds that prevelar raising is more widespread than previously reported: bag raising is found in much of the North and the Upper Midwest, and beg raising is far more variable and is common across much of the Midlands and the West, with concentrated pockets in the Northern Great Plains and various other regions. These data suggest that the two can occur independently, with areas like the upper Midwest exhibiting bag raising alone and the Midlands and the West reporting beg raising alone. These findings suggest that additional research on prevelar raising and other infrequent phonological variables is required to uncover their regional distribution and social meaning.