Rhoticity in Black Boston: Examining the effects of ethnicity and ethnic orientation

Abstract

Recent studies have sought to more thoroughly examine rhoticity among non-white Bostonians (Nagy andIrwin, 2010; Browne andStanford, 2018), as the city becomes more racially and ethnically diverse. We build upon Browne and Stanford (2018), which found that Black Bostonians (African American [AA] and Caribbean American [CA]) were more r-ful than White Bostonians. We seek to account for variation in this speech community by considering the impact of ethnicity and the emic measure of ethnic orientation (Hoffman andWalker, 2010) on rhoticity in Black Boston. Six CA and 18 AA Bostonians’ /r/ productions (n = 2018) were gathered from sociolinguistic interviews conducted as part of the Eastern Massachusetts Life and Language Project (Nesbitt andWatts, 2022), in addition to one CA and six AA participants from Browne and Stanford’s (2018) dataset. Linear mixed-effects modeling revealed significant effects of ethnicity, such that Caribbean Americans (95% r-ful) are almost categorically r-ful (p-value < 0.001), while African Americans are more variable (10%–100% r-ful). Furthermore, ethnic orientation was a significant predictor of rhoticity (p-value < 0.001); among African Americans, high ethnic orientation led to more r-fulness. Rather than ethnic identification alone, factors such as social networks, migration history, and language attitudes influence rhoticity in Black Boston.