Stylistic variation in African American Language: examining the social meaning of linguistic features in a Seattle community

Abstract

Linguistic features associated with African American Language (AAL) may have a large set of ideological and functional meanings beyond ethnic identity. While sociolinguists know a lot, comparatively, about regional and social differences in the use of features associated with AAL, we know less about how features associated with AAL operate in various interactions and situations. This study presents an opportunity to better understand features associated with AAL among speakers from the Pacific Northwest – specifically focusing on one multi-ethnic community of speakers who were raised in Yesler Terrace in Seattle, Washington. It situates phonetic and phonological variation at the intersection of ethnoracial identity, place, and style, analyzes stylistic (within-speaker) uses of linguistic features in interaction, and considers how individuals enact a range of identities using linguistic features associated with AAL in practice. The dissertation includes three analyses for this study: a descriptive analysis of vowel phonology among a sample of YT members, an Audience Design analysis of stylistic shifts in a single speaker, and a Speaker Design analysis of four speakers, looking at shifts in their use of a linguistic variable across the span of their respective interviews. The study contributes to our understanding of ethnicity and vowel variation in the Pacific Northwest, and finds that African American speakers in YT distinguish themselves from their European American peers by drawing on both super-regional features associated with AAL and features that are understood more as broad regional features. It shows that features associated with AAL can be utilized as a resource for meaning-making, outside of merely signaling some aspect of ethnicity. The study finds that /ɑɪ/ reduction in particular is available for YT members across ethnic lines as a linguistic resource, and argues that use of reduced /ɑɪ/ within YT operates, to some extent, independently of its group-associational meaning as an AAL variant. The study asserts that reduced /ɑɪ/, within the context of the YT interviews, can be used to signal particular working-class attitudes and values associated with growing up in Yesler Terrace. It argues more broadly that the use of linguistic features associated with AAL can be influenced by not only the ethnic makeup of a community, but also by community members’ ethnoracial attitudes, community values, and by a conversation’s interactional context. This work suggests that within multi-ethnic communities, the use of features associated with AAL may be more flexible, granular, and unbounded, and the social meaning of variants associated with AAL may be tied to locally salient values and identities.