FIGURE 1. Short front vowels in the

FIGURE 1. Short front vowels in the African American vowel system in Detroit (Jones, 2003), with short-a approximating the position of short-e.



The low back merger was represented by the backing and rounding of /o/ in cot, Don, etc.; here, Whites showed 52% but Blacks only 22%. In Milwaukee, Purnell (2010) demonstrated that local African Americans shifted their vowel systems measurably in the direction of the white dialect in interaction with white speakers of that dialect. In Michigan, Preston and colleagues found that minority ethnic groups exhibit vowel shifting in the direction of the Northern Cities Shift (Evans, Ito, Jones, & Preston, 2006). For African Americans, Jamila Jones’s (2003) study showed a partial reflection of the Northern Cities Shift (Figure 1): short-a has moved up to approximate the height of short-e but does not go beyond it. This diagram may reflect a general tendency in African American phonology that will also emerge in the present study of African American phonology in Philadelphia.


A F RI C A N A MERIC A N P H ONO L O G Y IN PH ILA D EL PH IA

The studies of African American phonology just cited show a regional effect: a measurable influence of the surrounding white dialect on the phonetic parameters of black speech. A more complete comparison of local black and white phonology can be obtained from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (PNC) by means of the Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction (FAVE) computational analysis of vowel systems. Labov, Rosenfelder, and Fruehwald (2013) (henceforth LRF) traced 100 years of sound change in the speech of 264 white adults in the PNC. LRF focused entirely on mainstream whites, who compose less than half of the Philadelphia total population of 1.55 million.1
There is little difference in the use of Philadelphia phonology among the whites of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Greek, and other European backgrounds. (Labov,


2001:245–250). But African Americans are a different story. This study examines the vowel systems of 36 African American speakers in that corpus to determine how much they participate in the ongoing changes and the degree to which they conform to the traditional phonological pattern of the local white mainstream.