Uncovering a focused Lebanese American English ethnolect in Dearborn Michigan

Chad Hall

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/110983 Copy

Description

Title

Uncovering a focused Lebanese American English ethnolect in Dearborn Michigan

Author(s)

Chad Hall

Issue Date

2021

Keyword(s)

• linguistics
• sociolinguistics
• language
• ethnolect
• Lebanese American

Geographic Coverage

Dearborn Michigan

Abstract

This study presents findings from a quantitative analysis of inter- and intraspeaker phonetic variability in the realization of /t/ and /d/ from second- and third- generation Lebanese American speakers from Dearborn, Michigan. The realization of /t/ and /d/ as either alveolar or dental (a substrate feature from Lebanese Arabic) is the focus of the analysis. The data, which come from 2006 corpus recordings, are also subject to diagnostics for a focused ethnolect i.e. the retention of distinctive features into the third and later generations of a speech community. These diagnostics are derived from new-dialect formation and ethnolect formation models. Evidence is found for a focused Lebanese American English ethnolect in Dearborn though the findings are tentative due to a small dataset. The results of the study lay the foundation for future work, which will seek to confirm these findings in greater detail.

Publisher

Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois Working Papers

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/110983

Owning Collections