Voices of coastal Georgia

Abstract

The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS; http://www.lap.uga.edu/Site/LAGS.html) contains sociolinguistic interview data from 914 speakers collected from 1968 to 1983. Impressionistic transcriptions of single words and phrases contributed to the dialectal description and mapping of the southern United States, but without systematic acoustic analysis. We gather recordings of target lexical items from ten LAGS speakers in Georgia’s coastal region, focusing on data collected near St. Marys in four counties (Camden, Glynn, Charlton, and Ware). When interviewed in 1972, speakers ranged from 23 to 80 years (mean 63.7; 5M, 5F); the data thus represent dialect features of the early-mid-20th Century, including the Gullah-speaking community of St. Simons Island. The analysis focuses on features known to characterize the dialect of this region: the monophthongal vowel space, the degree of vowel diphthongization, vowel mergers before /l/ and nasals, and rhoticity of the speaker’s dialect. Acoustic measurements are automatically extracted for comparison across speakers. The recordings (1 to 9 hours/speaker) were digitized as .wav within the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP; Kretzschmar 2011). Recordings collected for the LAP are an under-attended resource that will serve as a valuable comparison to contemporary studies of regional variation in the southern United States.