Canadians and Californians share more than a few passing similarities, speech-wise. After all, it didn’t take much suspension of disbelief to buy Canadian Keanu Reeves as a Valley native in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. (L.A. natives would probably disagree with my appraisal).
In both accents, the vowel in ‘dress’ tends to shift toward the vowel in ‘trap,’ the vowel in ‘trap’ tends to move toward the vowel in ‘lot’, while ‘lot’ merges with the vowel in ‘thought.’ As I’ve frequently discussed, this means that when a Californian says:
My pet cat Rod.
It might sound to someone from Chicago* like:
My pat cot rawed.
And yet something has always puzzled me about the parallel shifts in Canada and California: why does the shift seem so widespread in Canada, but more inconsistent in the Golden State?
A recent article in American Speech (the academic journal of The American Dialect Society) explores this very question. Robert Kennedy and James Grama’s Chain Shifting and Centralization in California Vowels: An Acoustic Analysis studied the speech of thirteen subjects from both Southern and Northern California.
The results confirmed my impressions: In California, the vowel in DRESS consistently moves toward TRAP, and the vowel in TRAP consistently moves toward the vowel in LOT. But the subjects were split nearly in half when it came to the vowel in LOT. Some retracted this vowel, so that it is (presumably) fairly close to the ‘standard’ British pronunciation of the word: [ɒ]. Others kept it more or less in the same position it is for most Americans, as an unrounded and fairly central ‘ah’ sound.
The range of variation of this one vowel indeed strikes me as remarkable. Some Angelenos conform to the ‘Valley Girl‘ stereotype of pronouncing such words with a back-rounded vowel (hence the stereotypical ‘Oh my gawwd’). Yet I’ve heard others pronounce it almost as one would in Chicago: [ä].
So what is it about California English that is more resistant to shifting the ‘o’ in ‘lot’? Is it (as Kennedy and Grama suggest) a matter of the two shifts being precipitated by the movement of different vowels? Or are there external factors that result in California maintaining the more ‘typical’ American vowel?
Source: Kennedy, R., & Grama, J. (2012). Chain shifting and centralization in California vowels: An acoustic analysis. American Speech, 87(1), 39-56.
*Okay, not quite. The Chicago DRESS vowel is actually usually retracted, and the Chicago TRAP vowel is raised and diphthongized. This is a very rough hypothetical example.