Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-v5vhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-22T01:13:25.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 8 - Internal Push, External Pull: The Reverse Short Front Vowel Shift in South African English

from II - Sociolinguistics, Globalisation and Multilingualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2019

By
Alida Chevalier
Edited by
Raymond Hickey
Raymond Hickey
Affiliation:
Universität Duisburg–Essen
Get access

Summary

This chapter outlines the recent development of short front vowel lowering in South African English as it is used in Cape Town by white speakers. Using the latest acoustic and statistical methods, the chapter shows how the KIT, DRESS and TRAP vowels are lowering and retracting in the speech of young speakers when compared to older speakers. The change that has had the most profound influence on the Reverse Vowel Shift is the extreme lowering and retraction of TRAP, which causes the lowering of DRESS in a pull chain. The FOOT vowel is well established as a centralised vowel which, because of its unrounded nature in South African English, overlaps with certain retracted KIT allophones. This can be seen as the impetus for the lowering of KIT as evidenced in the chapter. The Reverse Vowel Shift is an externally motivated, prestige-driven change due to the virtual contact with particularly American Englishes.

Keywords

acoustic sociophoneticsSouth African Englishshort front vowel loweringvirtual language contactprestige-driven change
Type
Chapter
Information
English in Multilingual South Africa
The Linguistics of Contact and Change
 , pp. 151 - 175
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bekker, Ian (2009). ‘The vowels of South African English’, unpublished PhD thesis, North-West University.Google Scholar
Bekker, Ian (2012). ‘South African English as a late nineteenth-century extraterritorial variety’, English World-Wide 33(2): 127–46.Google Scholar
Bekker, Ian (2014). ‘The kit-split in South African English: a critical review’, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 32(1): 113–31.Google Scholar
Bekker, Ian and Eley, Georgina (2007). ‘An acoustic analysis of White South African English (WSAfE) monophthongs’, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 25(1): 107–14.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul and Weenink, David (2014). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer Version 5.3.63 [Computer program], www.praat.org/ (last accessed 25 January 2014).Google Scholar
Boberg, Charles (2005). ‘The Canadian shift in Montreal’, Language Variation and Change 17(2): 133–54.Google Scholar
Bowerman, Sean (2004). ‘White South African English: phonology’, in Schneider, Edgar W., Burridge, Kate, Kortmann, Bernd, Mesthrie, Rajend and Upton, Clive (eds.), A Handbook of Varieties of English, Vol. 1: Phonology. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 931–42.Google Scholar
Bowie, David, Bushnell, Tracey, Collins, Alison, Driscoll, Becky, Joehnk, Jessa, Kubitskey, Katie, Kudenov, Peter, Meisner, Stacie, Ray, Melissa, Scotland, Brennan and Valentine, Noelle (2012). ‘A very northern California shift? The vowel system of southcentral Alaska’. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 41, Bloomington, October 25–28.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. K. (1998). ‘TV makes people sound the same’, in Bauer, Laurie and Trudgill, Peter (eds.), Language Myths. London: Penguin Books, pp. 123–31.Google Scholar
Chevalier, Alida (2016). ‘Globalisation versus internal development: the Reverse Short Front Vowel Shift in South African English’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cape Town.Google Scholar
Clarke, Sandra, Elms, Ford and Youssef, Amani (1995). ‘The third dialect of English: some Canadian evidence’, Language Variation and Change 7(2): 209–28.Google Scholar
Cox, Felicity and Palethorpe, Sallyanne (2008). ‘Reversal of short front vowel raising in Australian English’. Proceedings of Interspeech, 22–26 September 2008, Brisbane. Adelaide: Casual Productions, pp. 342–5.Google Scholar
Cox, Felicity and Palethorpe, Sallyanne (2012). ‘Standard Australian English: the socio-stylistic broadness continuum’, in Hickey, Raymond (ed.), Standards of English: Codified Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 294–317.Google Scholar
Du Plessis, Deon and Bekker, Ian (2014).’ To err is human: the case for neorhoticity in White South African English’, Language Matter 45(1): 23–39.Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2004). ‘Vowel shifts in Northern California and the Detroit suburbs: Northern California vowels’, www.stanford.edu/~eckert/vowels/html (last accessed 15 December 2017).Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope (2012). ‘Northern California vowels’, https://web.standford/edu/~eckert/vowels.html (last accessed 15 December 2017).Google Scholar
Evanini, Keelan (2009). ‘The permeability of dialect boundaries: a case study of the region surrounding Erie, Pennsylvania’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Gordon, Matthew J. (2002). ‘Investigating chain shifts and mergers’, in Chambers, J. K., Trudgill, Peter, and Schilling-Estes, Natalie (eds.), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 244–66.Google Scholar
Hartmann, Dieter and Zerbian, Sabine (2009). ‘Rhoticity in Black South African English: a sociolinguistic study’, Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 27(2): 135–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, Raymond (2013). ‘Variation and Change in Dublin English’, www.uni-due.de/VCDE/ (last accessed 22 July 2014).Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond (2016). ‘English in Ireland: development and varieties’, in Hickey, Raymond (ed.), Sociolinguistics in Ireland. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3–40.Google Scholar
Hickey, Raymond (2018). ‘“Yes, that’s the best”: short front vowel lowering in English today’, English Today 34(2): 9–16.Google Scholar
Holmes-Elliott, Sophie and Smith, Jennifer (2015). ‘dress down: /ɛ/-lowering in apparent time in a rural Scottish community’, in Proceedings from the XVII International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow.Google Scholar
Holmes-Elliott, Sophie and Smith, Jennifer (2018). ‘Dressing up down north: dress-lowering and /l/ allophony in a Scottish dialect’, Language Variation and Change 30(1): 23–50.Google Scholar
Jacewicz, Ewa, Fox, Robert A. and Salmons, Joseph (2011). ‘Vowel change across three age groups of speakers in three regional varieties of American English’, Journal of Phonetics 39: 683–93.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Robert and Grama, James (2012). ‘Chain shifting and centralisation in California vowels: an acoustic analysis’, American Speech 87(1): 39–55.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1991). ‘The three dialects of English’, in Eckert, Penelope (ed.), New Ways of Analysing Sound Change. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 1–44.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1979). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William (2010). Principles of Linguistic Change Volume 3: Cognitive and Cultural Factors. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Yaeger, Malcah and Steiner, Richard (1972). A Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress. Philadelphia: US Regional SurveyGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Rosenfelder, Ingrid and Fruehwald, Josef (2013).’ One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: linear incrementation, reversal, and reanalysis’, Language 89(1): 30–65.Google Scholar
Lanham, Len. W. (1965). ‘South African English pronunciation 2065 ad’, Taalfasette 1(1): 89–95.Google Scholar
Lanham, Len W. (1967). The Pronunciation of South African English: A Phonetic-Phonemic Introduction. Cape Town: A. A. Balkema.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger (1990). ‘A ‘standard’ South African vowel system’, in Ramsaran, Susan (ed.), Studies in the Pronunciation of English: A Commemorative Volume in Honour of A. C. Gimson. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 272–85.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger (2002). ‘South African English’, in Mesthrie, Rajend (ed.), Language in South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 104–26.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger (2004). ‘South African English’, in Hickey, Raymond (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 363–86.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger and Wright, Susan (1985). ‘The South African Chain Shift: order out of chaos?’, in Eaton, Roger, Fischer, Olga, Koopman, Willem, and van der Leek, Federike (eds.), Papers from the 4th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 137–61.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger and Wright, Susan (1986). ‘Endogeny vs. contact: ‘Afrikaans influence’ on South African English’, English World-Wide 7(2), 201–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lobanov, Boris M. (1971). ‘Classification of Russian vowels spoken by different speakers’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 49, 606–8.Google Scholar
Maclagan, Margaret and Hay, Jennifer (2007). ‘Getting fed up with our feet: contrast maintenance and the New Zealand English “short” front vowel shift’, Language Variation and Change 19(1): 1–25.Google Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend (2010). ‘Socio-phonetics and social change: deracialisation of the goose vowel in South African English’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(1): 3–33.Google Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend (2012). ‘Second-language varieties: English in Africa: a diachronic typology’, in Bergs, Alexander and Brinton, Laurel J. (eds.), English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook, Vol. 2. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, pp. 2092–106.Google Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend (2017). ‘Class, gender and substrate erasure in sociolinguistic change: a sociophonetic study of schwa in deracializing South African English’, Language 93(2): 314–46.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2014). ‘R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria’, www.r-project.org/ (last accessed 19 May 2019).Google Scholar
Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Fruehwald, Josef, Evanini, Keelan, and Yuan, Jiahong (2011). ‘FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite’, http://fave.ling.upenn.edu.Google Scholar
Stuart-Smith, Jane (2011). ‘The view from the couch: changing perspectives on the role of the television in changing language ideologies and use’, in Kristiansen, Tore and Coupland, Nikolas (eds.), Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe. Oslo: Novus Press, pp. 223–39.Google Scholar
Stuart-Smith, Jane, Price, Gwilym, Timmins, Claire and Gunter, Barrie (2013). ‘Television can also be a factor in language change: evidence from an urban dialect’, Language 89(3): 501–36.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali. A. (2012). Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A and Harald Baayen, R. (2012). ‘Models, forests, and trees of York English: was/were variation as a case study for statistical practice’, Language Variation and Change 24, 135–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toefy, Tracey (2014). ‘Sociophonetics and class differentiation: a study of working- and middle-class English in Cape Town’s Coloured community’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cape Town.Google Scholar
Torgersen, Eivind and Kerswill, Paul (2004). ‘Internal and external motivation in phonetic change: dialect levelling outcomes for an English vowel shift’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(1): 23–53.Google Scholar
Wells, John C. (1982). Accents of English, Vols. 1–3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Yuan, Jiahong and Lieberman, Mark (2008). ‘Vowel acoustic space in continuous speech: an example of using audio books for research’, in Proceedings of the Conference on ‘The First International Workshop on Cataloguing and Encoding of Spoken Language Data’ at CatCod 2008.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×