Mapping vowels: Variation and change in the speech of Gothenburg adolescents

Abstract

Until now, sociolinguistic investigations of Gothenburg have been scarce. This compilation thesis provides some of the first steps in a quantitative investigation of language variation and change in the city. Its results suggest that sociolinguistic variation ought to be studied with a bottom-up approach investigating on the one hand relationships among variables in what might be a coherent linguistic system and on the other hand the intersection of a range of social categories, rather than relationships between one category and one variable at a time. In three of the articles, analyses of variation in long vowel productions (and in one, also perceptions) are carried out. In the remaining article, the interaction between the informants in the activity used to collect data is described and analyzed. The data used for the articles are drawn from two corpora with young adolescents living in Gothenburg (and Stockholm): the SUF corpus, which consists of recordings of 222 informants collected for another project, and the SSG-corpus, material collected for this dissertation, which consists of recordings of 111 informants in two activities, an interview and a map-task. Acoustic and statistical analysis were carried out and analyzed on parts of both corpora. The second study in the collection describes how a map-task can be used as a sociolinguistic tool to collect a large number of tokens in a relaxed interaction between friends. The results from the first article in the collection show that variation in production of /ɛ:/ is related to the foreign vs. Swedish background of young informants in Gothenburg, but no significant differences were found in Stockholm. The third paper in the collection investigates not only this vowel but also eight other long vowels (or allophones). The acoustic and statistical analyses show that the pattern of variation can be captured by considering how foreign background conflates with socio-economic status and educational background. These categories can be captured by considering neighborhood as a factor, due to housing segregation in Gothenburg. The final paper provides acoustic and perceptual evidence that there is an incipient merger between /i:/ and /y:/ in Gothenburg. It also suggests that the reason behind the direction of this vowel merger is that lip-rounding is a perceptually weak feature, so the merger is in the direction of rounded to unrounded and not vice versa. Two general conclusions can be drawn from the thesis as a whole. The first is that to understand and describe sociolinguistic variation, proper attention needs to be given to how social categories intersect in a specific context before a study of the meaning attached to variation can be carried out. The second pertains to the ontological status of sociolinguistic variables. Some variables are undergoing widespread change; others are more locally bound. The adolescents in segregated suburbs can both be seen to lead widespread changes while not participating in more local variation and change. This pattern might indicate an orientation away from local dialectal norms.