California English - Phonology

Phonology

As a variety of American English, California English is similar to most other forms of American speech in being a rhotic accent, which is historically a significant marker in differentiating different English varieties. The following vowel diagram represents the relative positions of the stressed monophthongs of the accent, based on nine speakers from southern California. Notable is the absence of /ɔ/, which has merged with /ɑ/ through the cot–caught merger, and the relatively open quality of /ɪ/ due to the California vowel shift discussed below.

Several phonological processes have been identified as being particular to California English. However, these shifts are by no means universal in Californian speech, and any single Californian's speech may only have some or none of the changes identified below. The shifts might also be found in the speech of people from areas outside of California.

• Front vowels are raised before /ŋ/, so that /æ/ and /ɪ/ are raised to and before /ŋ/. This change makes for minimal pairs such as king and keen, both having the same vowel, differing from king in other varieties of English. Similarly, a word like rang will often have the same vowel as rain in California English, not the same vowel as ran as in other varieties.
• The vowels in words such as Mary, marry, merry are merged to .
• Most speakers do not distinguish between /ɔ/ and /ɑ/, characteristic of the cot–caught merger. A notable exception may be found within the San Francisco Bay Area, many of whose inhabitants' speech somewhat reflects a historical East-Coast heritage which has probably influenced the maintenance of the distinction between words such as caught and cot.
• According to phoneticians studying California English, such as Penelope Eckert, traditionally diphthongal vowels such as /oʊ/ as in boat and /eɪ/, as in bait, have acquired qualities much closer to monophthongs in some speakers.
• The pin–pen merger is complete in Bakersfield, and speakers in Sacramento either perceive or produce the pairs /ɛn/ and /ɪn/ close to each other.

One topic that has begun to receive much attention among scholars in recent years has been the emergence of a vowel shift unique to California. Much like other vowel shifts occurring in North America, such as the Southern Shift, Northern Cities Shift, and the Canadian Shift, the California Vowel Shift is noted for a systematic chain shift of several vowels.

This image on the right illustrates the California vowel shift. The vowel space of the image is a cross-section (as if looking at the interior of a mouth from a side profile perspective); it is a rough approximation of the space in a human mouth where the tongue is located in articulating certain vowel sounds (the left is the front of the mouth closer to the teeth, the right side of the chart being the back of the mouth). As with other vowel shifts, several vowels may be seen moving in a chain shift around the mouth. As one vowel encroaches upon the space of another, the adjacent vowel in turn experiences a movement in order to maximize phonemic differentiation.

Two phonemes, /ɪ/ and /æ/, have allophones that are fairly widely spread apart from each other: before /ŋ/, /ɪ/ is raised to and, as mentioned above, may even be identified with the phoneme /i/. In other contexts, /ɪ/ has a fairly open pronunciation, as indicated in the vowel chart above. /æ/ is raised and diphthongized to or before nasal consonants (a shift reminiscent of, but more restricted than, non-phonemic æ-tensing in the Inland North); before /ŋ/ it may be identified with the phoneme /e/. Elsewhere /æ/ is lowered in the direction of . The other parts of the chain shift are apparently context-free: /ʊ/ is moving towards, /ʌ/ towards, /ɛ/ toward, /ɑ/ toward, and /u/ and /oʊ/ are diphthongs whose nuclei are moving toward and respectively.

Unlike some of the other vowel shifts, however, the California Shift is generally considered to be in earlier stages of development as compared to the more widespread Northern Cities and Southern Shifts, although the new vowel characteristics of the California Shift are increasingly found among younger speakers. As with many vowel shifts, these significant changes occurring in the spoken language are rarely noticed by average speakers; imitation of peers and other sociolinguistic phenomena play a large part in determining the extent of the vowel shift in a particular speaker. For example, while some characteristics such as the close central rounded vowel or close back unrounded vowel for /u/ are widespread in Californian speech, the same high degree of fronting for /oʊ/ is common only within certain social groups.

Older native Californians tend to pronounce the suffixes -ive (motive) and -age (message) as eve and eej, respectively.

In the southern Central Valley (Kern, Tulare, and Kings Counties), where a large number of people from Oklahoma emigrated during the Dust Bowl, many white Californians speak with an Oklahoma-like accent that is quite distinct from the English spoken in coastal Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay region.