Minnesota
Particular American dialects in the Upper Midwest are colloquially known for word-final devoicing, where voiced obstruents can variably surface as their voiceless counterparts. (See, for example, the old recurring SNL skit “Bill Swerski’s Super Fans,” where Chicago sports fans discussed “Da Bears” [daː beɹsː].) This sociolinguistic pattern has been studied in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, and in the Iron Range of Minnesota, which is known for its unique dialect. I investigated word-final devoicing patterns in the Twin Cities metro area of Minnesota, with 30 speakers across three generations. My findings have been accepted for publication and will be appearing in American Speech.
Recently, I’ve been examining the vowel system of Minnesotan English, and how it has changed over (apparent) time. Good news: the often stereotyped monophthongal [o] is indeed still monophthongal, and still very backed, forming what I consider the “anchor” of the Minnesotan vowel space. You can see more from my recent presentation at the American Dialect Society’s January 2024 meeting.
I’m collaborating with Nicole Rosen at the University of Manitoba to investigate consonantal variation in Canadian Prairie English. The Canadian Prairies had an immigration system at the end of the nineteenth century called bloc settlement, where different ethnicities were settled in specific lands reserved for them. This resulted in a very different linguistic landscape in comparison to other parts of Canada. The Languages in the Prairies Project is thus an ongoing sociolinguistic study of Prairie English spoken in rural communities, taking into account different ethnic and/or religious backgrounds.
In our work, we’ve found that there are unique patterns to plosive voicing between some of these communities that are not typically found in North American English. Our findings from two communities were just published in the Proceedings of ICPhS 2023, and can also be found here. More recently, we’ve been examining center of gravity (COG) measurements in fricatives, and focusing on their social meaning in Winnipeg.
