Digi Colloquium

Join us for a discussion with Lars Hinrichs, associate professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Axel Bohmann, assistant professor of English at University of Freiburg in Germany. They will discuss the building of the Digital Archive of Texas English Speech, a legacy archive containing recordings from 1934 to 2020, and how it can be used to map linguistic changes in Texas English over time.

For quite some time, the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin has offered the course “E 321L: American English”. In this class, students typically record interviews with speakers of Texas English (TxE), and then write and submit their analyses for their grade. Over the years, a sizable archive of audio recordings has thus been collected. It forms one part of the Digital Archive of Texas English Speech that we are currently building. Currently, the digitization of recordings (which cover the years from 1934 to 2020) as well as their transcription is complete, and we are analyzing the data with an interest in changes in the Texas English accent.

In this lecture, we present results from three phonetic variables that are implicated in ongoing change in TxE: (1) the Short Front Vowel Shift, which is a new site of variation in TxE; (2) the LOT~THOUGHT vowel, which is an established variable in TxE; and (3) the monophthongization of PRICE, which is recessive. In other words, we will look into our near-century of data and ask: (1) are words like chick, check, and Jack starting to sound systematically different than before? (2) Are word pairs like Don and Dawnstarting to sound identical? And (3) is nice white rice still being pronounced as “nahs waht rahs”? And whenever the answer is “yes”: who are the speakers who show those features, in which regions of Texas do they live, etc.?

The new digital archive allows us to answer these questions in more detail and at a higher level of precision than has previously been possible.

Contact digi@uga.edu for Zoom link