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On an unusually clear Saturday morning in San Francisco in March 2008, I was interviewing a woman in her early 60s whom I'll call Cheri. Cheri was a thirdgeneration San Franciscan who identified as Irish American. Ever since she was a young child she had lived in San Francisco's largest neighborhood, the Sunset District: four square miles of sand dunes blanketed by a broad patchwork of modest, near-identical pastel-colored homes.
English Language and Linguistics
‘Flip-flop’ and mergers-in-progress2013 •
During a merger-in-progress, occasionally one or two speakers will exhibit an unusual phonological pattern reminiscent of flip-flop (Labov et al. 1972). In such cases, the merging vowels appear to move past the point of coalescence in at least one phonetic dimension; difference is maintained but the vowel quality is opposite to the historical pattern on one or both dimensions. Flip-flop between the cot and caught vowels occurs for two speakers in a recent sample from San Francisco, California. The community shows robust change in progress toward a lower and fronter caught vowel nucleus, and no change in apparent time for cot. Further analysis shows that this is leading to a change in apparent time toward merger, and that the rate of vowel convergence is stronger among Chinese Americans than European Americans. The two speakers who produce flip-flop are seen to represent a key transitional generation with respect to the ethnic identity of the neighborhood, where flip-flop may be but ...
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
Ethnicity and Sound Change in San Francisco English2009 •
2014 •
This chapter explores the possibility that Chinese social and linguistic practices are available resources for place authentication in contemporary San Francisco. The analysis draws on ethnographic observation and a content analysis of retrospective narratives about youth styles in neighborhood schools in the 1990s. The emergence of new indexes of place authenticity is seen as a result of the transnationalization of San Francisco and the emergence of neighborhoods known as New Chinatowns (Laguerre 2005). In contrast to earlier periods of American history, these neighborhoods have become sites of new hybridities and the local authentication of what were previously the most exotic and foreign of social practices.
2010 •
2020 •
Publication of the American Dialect Society
3. Between California and the Pacific Northwest: The Front Lax Vowels in San Francisco English2016 •
2015 •
San Francisco English has been previously identified as distinct from Californian English, based on its maintenance of a low back vowel distinction [13]. Subsequent work has shown participation in the low back merger and other Californian sound changes [15]. We present an analysis of the front and central vowels involved in the California Vowel Shift: KIT, DRESS, TRAP, and STRUT. Previous work in San Francisco [8] found raised DRESS after velars, and raised KIT, DRESS, and TRAP before nasals. Elsewhere in California [11], KIT and DRESS are lowering; TRAP is raising before nasals and backing before orals (‘the nasal split’). We examine vowels produced in read speech by 24 speakers stratified by age, gender, and ethnicity. Results show apparent time evidence of DRESS lowering/backing and the TRAP ‘nasal split’. Effects of style and gender raise further questions. The results point to San Francisco English converging on broader regional patterns.
This dissertation explores language as a resource for the formation and expression of ethnic identity among the members of an Asian American college sorority. As a community of practice organized around ethnicity, the sorority provides an excellent site to examine the mutually constitutive relationship of language and ethnic identity. Two features of the sorority members' speech are analyzed in detail: their pronunciation of the mid-back rounded GOAT vowel, and their prosodic rhythm. For both variables, the behavior of the sorority members is compared with that of college peers of both Asian and non-Asian descent. The results indicate that both segmental and suprasegmental features are available as markers of Asian American ethnicity, and that the association of linguistic features with ethnicity is mediated by group membership and region, among other factors. The community of study is an Asian-interest sorority at a large public university in New Jersey. The data are drawn from two main sources: participant observation of sorority activities and one-on-one sociolinguistic interviews. The ethnographic observations allow the behaviors and beliefs of the sorority members to be situated in the local context of the school, the state, and the region. The interview data, meanwhile, provide high-quality spontaneous speech data for phonetic analysis. It is argued that it is only through an understanding of the particular social context in which speakers exist that their linguistic behavior can be understood; conversely, examining linguistic behavior can illuminate how identity categories such as "Asian American" are construed and enacted within a given social setting. The segmental variable analyzed in this study is the realization of the mid-back rounded vowel in the GOAT class of words. A quantitative analysis shows that the sorority members produce a more backed and monophthongal GOAT vowel than their non-Asian peers. In previous work, the fronting of GOAT has been noted as an ongoing change in certain regional dialects in the United States; however, the present analysis shows that sorority members tend to produce backer GOAT vowels than non-Asian speakers regardless of region. The suprasegmental variable analyzed is prosodic rhythm, which refers to the relative length of adjacent syllables in speech. English is typically described as a stress-timed language, with stressed syllables being much longer than unstressed syllables. However, the sorority members' speech shows characteristics of syllable timing, with stressed and unstressed syllables being of roughly equal length. This finding coincides with those for other varieties of English, including Hispanic English and Singapore English. It is argued that syllable timing in English is likely a substrate effect from syllable-timed heritage languages, including Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean. Individual differences in prosodic rhythm are also examined with respect to age of acquisition and other inter- and intraspeaker factors. This dissertation draws on multiple research traditions in the study of language and identity: it is an ethnographic description of a community of practice as well as a sociophonetic study of regionally and ethnically linked variables. It is also a study of young women's language at a critical stage of identity formation—the college years. Additionally, this dissertation is part of a growing body of sociolinguistic research on Asian Americans, a group that until recently has been drastically understudied. As a group with tremendous internal diversity, Asian Americans present both challenges and opportunities for the study of language and ethnicity. This dissertation thus advances sociolinguistic research in two ways: one, by shedding light on the language practices of this rapidly growing population, and two, by contributing to our overall understanding of how language interacts with various facets of identity, including ethnic identity.
Publication of the American Dialect Society 105
The nature of BOOT-fronting among African-Americans in Bakersfield, California2020 •
Previous sociolinguistic research has described two distinct types of BOOT-fronting: Southern fronting and Western fronting (e.g., Koops 2010, Hall-Lew 2004). Southern fronting has been described as relatively monopthongal with a small F2 movement over the course of the vowel, while Western fronting has been described as dipthongal, with a larger magnitude F2 movement in a negative direction. We examine the nature of BOOT-fronting among African-Americans in Bakersfield, California. While previous work (King & Calder forthcoming) has found that Bakersfield African-Americans front to the same degree as their White counterparts, we explore the directionality and magnitude of formant movement in order to assess whether Bakersfield African-Americans exhibit patterns closer to Southern or Western fronting. We find that while Bakersfield African-Americans exhibit a relatively monophthongal realization of BOOT— consonant with Southern fronting— the movement of F2 is in a negative direction— consonant with Western fronting. In other words, trajectory patterns illuminate a variant that is somewhere in between the two previously described patterns, allowing Bakersfield African-Americans to index place identity with BOOT frontness, while still maintaining a distinction from the BOOT-fronting described for Anglo speakers in the West.
2012 •
2007 •
2017 •
American Jewish History
The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai into Post-World War II San Francisco2020 •
2011 •
Pacific Historical Review
Anti-Catholicism and Race in Post-Civil War San Francisco2009 •
2002 •
2014 •
Annales de démographie historique
Housing reconstruction after the catastrophe: the failed promise of San Francisco's 1906 earthquake cottages2011 •
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Consuming the consumers: Semiotics of Hawaii Creole in advertisements2011 •
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
Archaeology of San Francisco Jews: Themes for the Study of Jewish Domestic Life2021 •
Archaeologies
A Teapot, a House, or Both? The Material Possessions of Irish Women's California Assemblages2011 •
Journal of The History of Sexuality
That's My Place!": Negotiating Racial, Sexual, and Gender Politics in San Francisco's Gay Latino Alliance, 1975-19832003 •
2008 •
Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography
Race and the Making of Southeast San Francisco: Towards a Theory of Race-Class2014 •
FROM STREET TO SCREEN: LINGUISTIC PRODUCTIONS OF PLACE IN SAN FRANCISCO’S MISSION DISTRICT
LYONS-DISSERTATION-2018.pdf2018 •
alter/nativas: Latin American Cultural Studies Journal,
Black and Tan Realities: Chicanos in the Borderlands of the Hip-Hop Nation2014 •
2018 •