Migration, Accommodation and Language Change

This work marries qualitative ethnographic methods to quantitative acoustic methods. The analysis describes how internal and external factors in phonological change differ and demonstrates how these two forces interact to structure the phonological systems of Appalachian and African American Southern Migrant speakers in the Detroit, Michigan area.

BRIDGET L. ANDERSON is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Old Dominion University, Virginia, USA. Her research investigates the social and phonological meaning of fine-grained acoustic phonetic detail present in the everyday speech that people use to situate themselves in social worlds. It addresses the theoretical concern of the relationship between internal (i.e. phonological) tendencies, such as coarticulation, and external (i.e. social/ideological) constraints on language change. The overarching goal of her research is to model how the speech signal provides social/ideological as well as linguistic information and to determine the mechanisms by which acoustic cues carry different social/ideological information over time, space, socially meaningful groups, and for individuals.