DuBois and Horvath 1998

DuBois, Silvie and Barbara Horvath. 1998. Let's tink about dat:

Interdental fricatives in Cajun English.

Language Variation and Change, 10 (3), 245-261.

Dubois and Horvath examine the realization of the English interdental fricative among a community of fluent French-bilingual Cajun English speakers in Louisiana. They examine the degree to which the voiced (dh) and voiceless (th) English interdental fricatives are realized in the speech of the Cajun English speakers (as stops or as fricatives). Their analysis accounts for the age and sex of the speakers as well as whether or not the speakers have closed or open social networks. Ultimately they find the best predictors of fricative stopping is the combination of social network and sex, with somewhat opposite results--men with open social networks are more likely to stop, whereas women with closed networks are more likely to stop. They conclude that this is due to the stopped variant being particularly salient to indexing male identity in the community, whereas for the women, it is more mutable and more likely to change as they interact with non Cajun-English speakers.

Some important points about method for my own use:

D and H found four times as many (dh) as (th)

coded all words, but only analyzed fully dental variants

coded all words for the following linguistic features:

• stress
• # of syllables
• lexical category
• if function word, type of function word
• preceding phonological variant

Thomas 2007

Thomas, Erik R. 2007. Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of African American Vernacular English. Language and Linguistics Compass 1/5 (2007): 450–475.

In his very thorough article, Thomas outlines a large number of phonological and phonetic variables in African American English (AAE) and suggests ways we might study these variables in the comparison and contrast to European American varieties, particularly Southern White Vernacular English (SWVE). Thomas argues that although a great deal of research on AAE has dealt with morphosyntactic variation, phonological and phonetic variables represent the richest information source for how AAE is changing.

Thomas examines a number of consonental variables:

• consnential lexical variations (sk, sp metathesis)
• Rlessness and l-vocalilzation
• Interdental Fricative realization
• Consonant Cluster Simplicificaion/ -t/-d deletion
• rarer features, such as /skr/ for /str/

and also vowel veatures

• lack of HAPPY tensing
• PIN-PEN merger
• AAE shift
• GOOSE-GOAT fronting

Most interestingly, Thomas also includes other phonological variables beyond the most commonly studied AAE variables, such as voice quality, tone (using the ToBI system), prosody, and timing. I thought this was one of the most instructive areas in which he extended his research. Ultimately, Thomas calls for approaches which look at AAE variables on all levels of phonetics and phonology, and suggests that such an approach would have broad application not only within sociolinguistics but within other realms such as applied and educational linguistics as well.