The Low-Back Merger in the Steel City: African American English in Pittsburgh

Abstract

This article investigates the status of the low-back vowels in African American English in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the vowels have been merged since at least the late 1800s. The low-back merger is currently spreading across much of the United States, but to date, its incidence in African American speech has been found to be limited. This article draws from a sample of 34 African Americans native to Pittsburgh. Using data from a word list along with an acoustic analysis of the low-back vowels in conversational speech from sociolinguistic interviews, this article shows that African Americans in Pittsburgh have merged the low-back vowels, thus sharing in this feature of the local phonological system. The article also explores the sociohistorical conditions that facilitated the spread of the merger from white to African American speech in the region.