Chain shift

Boers of Patagonia

cutting from The Times about Afrikaans in Patagonia [Published on 01-12-2019]

Posted by Poppy Frean on February 14, 2019

Tags:: Grammaticalization;; Language Shift;; Chain shift

Paula Deen, Y'all!

Though it tragically does not contain any olive oil (my favorite thing to hear Paula Deen say), this clip is a really good example of a lot of the features of Southern English we talked about in class. Around 1:25, there's a very clear "nice" that is obviously still a diphthong, indicating that Paula is not from the Appalachian region or northern Texas, where speakers monophthongize before voiceless consonants.

Posted by Miriam Gölz on October 7, 2014

Tags:: Southern English;; Chain shift;; ai monophthongization;; ai diphthongization

How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk: Personal Dialect Map Activity

Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux's current website. The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities being named the most (or least) similar to you." I thought of this when we were talking about conceptions of American dialects.

Posted by Sara Mulliner on December 23, 2013