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ASA/CAA '05 Meeting, Vancouver, BC

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Pacific Northwest Vowels: A Seattle Neighborhood Dialect

Study
Jennifer Ingle
merywen@u.washington.edu
Richard Wright
Alicia Beckford Wassink
Department of Linguistics
P.O. Box 354340 University of
Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-4340

Popular version of paper 2pSC14

Presented Tuesday afternoon, May
17, 2005 BALLARD, WASHINGTON
149th ASA Meeting, Vancouver,
BC

As early as 1889, when the American Dialect Society was founded, researchers have been concerned
with the description and classification of English dialects in the United States. Through the combined
efforts of sociolinguistic and acoustical phonetic research, great strides have been made in developing
our understanding of what it means to “speak American.”

The Northwest, which may be considered to include any combination of Washington, Oregon, Idaho,
parts of northern California, western Montana and Wyoming, as well as British Columbia and Alberta
in Canada, is one of the fastest growing metropolitan regions in North America and is home to a lively
assortment of cultures and a diverse geography. Despite this, dialect studies have paid this region
relatively little attention, lumping everything west of the Rocky Mountains into a broad “Western”
dialect which, according to leading dialect researcher William Labov, “has developed a characteristic
but not unique phonology .”

Presented here is a small-scale site study of the acoustic model of vowel production of fourteen
speakers from the Ballard neighborhood in Seattle, Washington which, combined with larger
representative samples based on survey methodology, will contribute to a more detailed picture of

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variety within the “Western” dialect.

Participants were recorded in two styles of speech: individually reading a word list targeting the 15
American vowels, and engaged in casual conversation with an interlocutor matched in age, gender,
and social mobility. Dyads were either friends or family of one another. The goal was to create a
compatible data set for comparison with current acoustic studies, while imposing careful controls on
sociolinguistic variables. Demographic questionnaires were also completed by the speakers to provide
information for future analysis in the Social Network Theory framework.

Discussions of the Western dialect necessarily include mention of the “low-back merger”, the merging
of the vowels found in the words cot and caught. That is, while in some dialects these two words
sound different, in those dialects where the merger occurs, they sound exactly the same. The present
study confirms this finding within the population of speakers from Ballard.

This man from Michigan makes the distinction between stopped and small. The difference is lost,
however, between the following pairs of words spoken by people from Ballard:

hot hawed hot hawed

odd ought odd ought

In what has been described as the “Canadian Shift,” this merger is thought to trigger changes in other
vowels, as it leaves a “gap” in the vowel space. One such change, which might be expected to occur
in the Ballard speakers, is the retraction of the vowel in bad to sound more like bod. Here are two
examples, the first from Canadian English:

I usually smoke about half a pack a day...

And from California English:

that

Findings were inconclusive. Male speakers tended to retract slightly, while females showed some
raising.

A second property associated with the Western dialect is fronting of the vowel found in words such as
rude or who’d to become more like ri-ood or hi-ood. This shows up, for example, in California. Click
on the following word to hear uw-fronting:

move

The Ballard speakers did not demonstrate this. For example:

hoot root
hoot who’d

“Canadian Raising” is the name which has been given to the pattern where the first part of the
diphthong found in words such as height and out are raised, when they occur before a voiceless

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consonant. (Diphthongs are vowels which begin with one vowel sound and gradually shift to another,
as in point, pout, pipe. In a voiceless consonant, the vocal cords are not vibrating to produce sound
during the consonant, for example: p,t,k,f.) Examples of Canadian English contrasting pairs, raised
and unraised diphthongs:

five fife
loud stout

Again, although some speakers showed some inclination for raising before voiceless consonants, the
data do not support this feature for the dialect of these speakers.

In addition to vowel quality, we sometimes vary phonation type, or voicing quality. It is not
uncommon for American females to use what is called “breathy” voicing, and males to use “creaky”
voicing. In the first type, the vowel is spoken with a sighing or “h-like” quality. The second type may
be heard in “hat.”

Women in the Northwest have a tendency to use creaky voicing more. It showed up in the elicitation
task, and 6 out of the 8 females used it regularly throughout their conversations.

This is actually like, an apartment building...

And, I mean, they broke up...

While it is possible to generally describe how these Ballard speakers pronounce their vowels based on
the analysis of the more formal speech used when reading a list of words, there is still important
information missing. Is this really how they talk in their daily lives? In the seventies, groundbreaking
sociolinguistic research in Norway by Jan-Petter Blom and John Gumperz verified the common-sense
notion that there are indeed very different ways we talk in different situations, which are governed by
social factors like the formality of our setting, or our relationship with who we are talking to. By
considering a variety of speech styles as they occur in different registers, researchers have access to a
fuller range of language production. They can elicit, by asking someone to read a script or list of
words, sounds like the vowel in look, which is relatively rarely used in casual speech, but by also
recording people engaged in more casual conversation in a natural setting, researchers can take into
account the variety of ways we may produce each sound when we’re not focusing on deliberate
pronunciation.

Here are three examples of the vowel ae, as in hat, in three environments.

I just like, like Ballard, it’s got...

Two and a half hours, and I had to take a three hour nap.
He just kind of waves the Bible, or a flag, or...

With the low-back merger, as mentioned above, Ballard speakers no longer make a distinction
between, for example haughty and hottie. One would expect the resulting merged vowel to fall
somewhere between the two. This proved to be the case, with a preference for the lower vowel, in the
word list data. In the conversational data, we see a rather different pronunciation, something
approaching the sound in the word had. It is interesting to note that this is marked as a property of

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another vowel shift occurring in the Inland North, the “Northern Cities Chain Shift.”

I saw it being delivered...

All of her pots, and stuff...
I said, “God it’s a gorgeous day!”
People were honking at her...

Two very different instances of the vowel ey, considered a diphthong in American English, and not in
Canadian.

Lost all this weight; she was like, five pounds...

I was watchin’ the Braves...

Much more could be said about this dialect, both about its vowels in neutral phonetic contexts, and
about the variety of those vowels produced in casual speech. Not to mention the consonants, like why
you find such a pronounced “s” in the Northwest.

Charles Lindbergh lived his last years in Hawaii

Thus the speech from this collection of Ballard residents conforms to some, but not all, traits and
patterns of change expected within the phonology of the broadly-defined Western Dialect Region to
which it is considered to belong.

To hear more Canadian English, visit visit the University of Arizona’s Language Samples Project.

To hear more Californian English, visit Penelope Eckert’s Web Page.

To hear more from other dialects, visit The International Dialects of English Archive.

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