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