Consonantal Variation in Utah English

Joseph A. Stanley and Kyle Vanderniet
University of Georgia

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the frequency of three consonantal variables in Utah English: the glottal stop in words like mountain, [t]-epenthesis in words with /ls/ clusters like salsa, and word-final velar nasals (NG+). Using Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect audio, we gathered 2,795 tokens of these variables. Though relatively few nonmainstream variants were found in our sample, we find indications of phonetic conditioning and that women and younger speakers used some nonmainstream variants more. Ultimately, further work and a larger dataset is required to more fully describe these variables in Utah English.

 

Proceedings of the 4th Annual Linguistics Conference at UGA: 50–65.

Published June 3, 2018

 

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