The reversal of a sound change in Cincinnati

Stephanie Strassel & Charles Boberg

Sat. 11:00-12:40 A

Boberg and Strassel (1995) presented the results of a study of phonological change in the variety of American English spoken in Cincinnati, Ohio. The most striking finding of this study is that the tensing of short-a (/æ/), which characterizes most American dialects, appears to be receding in Cincinnati. So far as we know, this reversal is unique to Cincinnati. Such an unexpected result merits closer examination.

Based on an analysis of formally-elicited data from wordlists and semantic differential tasks, we observed that Cincinnatians tense short-a in a pattern similar to that of New York City: /æ/ becomes tense before nasals, voiced stops and voiceless fricatives, and remains lax elsewhere. While the oldest speakers in our sample closely followed the traditional /æ/-tensing pattern, the middle and youngest speakers showed significantly less tensing in these environments, with three of the five youngest speakers tensing nowhere except before nasals.

Our initial study left two important questions unanswered. First, our analysis was based solely on formally-elicited data, and did not include any data from spontaneous speech. If /æ/-tensing in Cincinnati has any of the social dimensions that characterize this variable in other cities, then an analysis of spontaneous speech is clearly necessary in order to properly assess the nature of the change. Spontaneous speech data will also allow us to establish more exactly the pattern of tensing for all speakers in a wide range of phonological environments, some of which were not addressed in our initial work. Second, two of our five youngest speakers did tense in non-nasal environments, one of them as much as the oldest speakers. This apparent anomaly, which may be a crucial part of the social profile of the change, will be more thoroughly investigated in the present paper.

With the analysis of spontaneous speech data that we present in this paper, we hope to shed more light on the unique characteristics of short-a in Cincinnati and thereby contribute to the picture that is emerging from other dialect studies of unexpected diversity in the speech of the American Heartland.