Dr. Annette D’Onofrio is joining us to give a colloquium talk this fall! Please see details of the talk below.
Dr. Annette D’Onofrio is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at Northwestern University. She will present on her work on Chicagoland project, style, and personae.
Time: Thursday (09/15/2022) 4:30-6:15pm Eastern Time
Event: In-person and Zoom
- In-person location: Wells Hall B342
- Zoom information:
- Colloquium Zoom link: https://msu.zoom.us/j/91929271197
- Passcode: MSU
Talk Abstract
Locating sound change reversal: Racialized and age-based patterns of the Northern Cities Shift in a Chicago community
While dialectological work once indicated that American English regional dialects were becoming increasingly disparate over time (e.g. Labov 2014), recent sociolinguistic studies are revealing the opposite trend in some regions, showing movement away from regionally distinctive language features (e.g. Prichard & Tamminga 2012, Dodsworth & Kohn 2012). Specifically, the Inland North region’s characteristic Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS), which had been advancing throughout the 20th century (Labov 2007), has begun to reverse its trajectory in some Inland North locales (Driscoll & Lape 2015; Wagner et al. 2016), including in Chicago (McCarthy 2011, Durian & Cameron 2019). In this talk, I explore the ways in which NCS reversal is socially conditioned in one Chicago neighborhood area. I demonstrate how both broader sociohistorical dynamics of migration and racialization, as well as highly localized oppositions and ideologies, inform patterns of vocalic change in this neighborhood.
