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Women and sound change: Conservative and innovative behavior by the same speakers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1999

Margaret A. Maclagan ,
Elizabeth Gordon  and
Gillian Lewis
Margaret A. Maclagan
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury
Elizabeth Gordon
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury
Gillian Lewis
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury
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Abstract

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In this article we address Labov's claim that 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. We investigated this claim by comparing the pronunciation of the non-stigmatized front vowels /I/, /ε/, and /æ/ with that of the stigmatized diphthongs /ai/ and /a[inverted omega]/ in New Zealand English. When we considered the pronunciation of each variable, the young women did not unequivocally support Labov's claim. However, when we examined the behavior of individual speakers across the two sets of variables, Labov's claim was supported. This result leads us to emphasize the importance of considering the behavior of individual speakers in a more holistic way rather than focusing only on the averaged data for single variables.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 19 - 41
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press