To a some degree, Figure 10 shows t

To a some degree, Figure 10 shows the approximation of African Americans to the surrounding white system that was found in the review of the previous literature. The reverse aspect appears in the concentration of minority speakers in the lower left of Figure 10: no whites are to be found in the region limited by 1 on the horizontal axis and .5 on the vertical axis.9 A prototypical speaker in this region is Jackie C., identified with the black triangle labeled 5 at 0.15,0.44. Her short-a data is shown in Figure 12, displaying an effective merger of tense and lax categories. The phonetic character of that merger involves a general raising of all short-a words but avoids the strongly fronted domain of the white mainstream tensed style, so that the contrast between short /e/ and short /æ/ is small in the F1/F2 dimensions, enhanced by a small difference in mean duration (87 msec vs. 105 msec).
The phonetic pattern found among the speakers in the lower left corner of
Figure 10 resembles the pattern reported by Jones in Michigan in Figure 2. The raising of short-a to a nonperipheral, lower mid vowel may be a general characteristic of dialects that reject the peripheral raising of the white community. A similar pattern has been noted among Hispanic speakers in New York City.
Jackie C. is a prototypical speaker of the AAVE community in several respects.
The following extract from her speech shows many characteristic features of
AAVE, including had as a simple past marker, axe for ask, and negative


TABLE 3. Indices of dominance for five ethnic groups in Philadelphia from 1850 to 1970