 Englishuser wrote: |
| What's interesting is that these changes are led by younger female speakers. Older speakers and male speakers adopt these kind of changes later. |
|
Yes, that really is interesting. Why are the changes led by younger female speakers in particular? What about younger male speakers?
Englishuser |
|
Yes, that is an interesting question. Here's what I could find:
http://journals.cambridge.org/production/action/cjoGetFulltext?fulltextid=43356"...sound changes that are not stigmatized are led especially by young women who are the 'movers and shakers' in the community, people with energy and enterprise. Such young women, at the same time, are conservative with respect to sound changes or stable linguistic variables that are stigmatized."
http://cf.hum.uva.nl/poldernederlands/english/lin_polder.htm"It is in fact common for sound changes to be initiated by women (see Labov 2001: 366-382) . . . Van Bezooijen and van den Berg (2001) have shown that young women, as opposed to older women, identify with the new variety, and clearly more so than their male counterparts. The speakers of the new variety are not aware of the fact that their pronunciation of the language differs in any linguistically relevant way from the standard variety. When accused of using the avant-garde pronunciation their first reaction is denial..."
This is interesting. Although the California vowel shift does not stick out that much to me, as it's fairly similar to that of my own dialect, the Northern Cities vowel shift does, because it has practically opposite features. I have definitely found this to be true. Most younger females from the Northern Midwest have very strong accents to me--I can usually recognize that they're proabably from the Northern Midwest just by them saying one sentence--especially one the contains the vowel /æ/, as they diphthongize it to [ i@ ] or [ e@ ] which is quite noticible. Male speakers on the other hand usually have a much slighter accent, that doesn't differ from my own enough to be immediately noticible. Older speakers are less likely to have the shift.