Vowel patterning of Mormons in Southern Alberta, Canada

Abstract

This paper examines the patterning of /æ/ in the English of Southern Alberta, Canada, with particular attention paid to differences between the general population and Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). Expanding on work by Meechan (1999) and Sykes (2010), who examine /aw/ and /ai/ diphthongs among the LDS population, we first show that /æ/ is significantly raised before /g/ among speakers in Southern Alberta. We then show that Mormons in the region do not display as strong raising in this linguistic environment. We attribute this to the strong social network of the Mormons in rural Southern Alberta which has a conservative influence on the /æ/ in the English of Mormon church members in the region. We further show that young Mormon women are the most divergent from their other Southern Alberta counterparts, which may be an indication of them being more conservative than other groups, contra many studies showing that women are innovators in sociophonetic change (for example Eckert 1989; Labov, 1990; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes, 1998), or it may be an indicator that these young Mormon women are innovators of a different pattern.