Regional, social, and stylistic variation in American English pronunciation

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present variation in American English pronunciation with respect to such factors as region, sex, age, social status, style, and context. We will select a few variables and analyze them in terms of their possible realizations – so called variants or candidates. With regard to the occur-rence of variant realizations of a particular variable, it is crucial to stress that our analysis is not solely linguistically-conditioned since it also encompasses social and contextual factors which definitely contribute to the variation. The analysis from the purely linguistic point of view would be either erroneous or at least incomplete and thus unreliable. Therefore, the variation will be analyzed linguisti-cally, socially, and contextually. We will observe the occurrence of at least two (or more) variants of particular variables (linguistically) and analyze their evaluation as prestigious or substandard (socially, contextually). In other words, we will indi-cate that with the emergence of the variants, one cannot avoid making judgments about the alleged betterness or worseness of either of them.