fronted /oU/

Alice Faber faber at ALVIN.HASKINS.YALE.EDU
Sat Nov 4 22:43:53 UTC 2000

Tim Frazer said:

>All these examples of /ow/ fronting raise some interesting questions.
>1.  Is it a  pandialectal movement?  It's in the southern shift, which is
>usually account for as a chain shift in which various vowels diplace each
>other, and Labov seems to include "southern England, New Zealand, South
>Africa, the Middle Atlantic States, the Southern Mountain States, and both
>the Upper and Lower South" in this shift.  But how does this account for
>/ow/ fronting among California women, or, as Alice just mentioned, in CT (it
>really blows my mind to hear it is there.  I had no idea).

I'll have to check files in the lab to see which group of CT/NY area
speakers I've seen this in, since we've done several studies that are at
various stages of preparation. In no case was /ow/ fronting the focus;
mostly, we were just mapping out people's vowel spaces to provide context
for other phenomena.

What's definitely different from other frontings that I know of in the US
(Southern Shift, and the possibly related Utah stuff that Marianna Di Paolo
and I have looked at) is the relationship with /uw/. The canonical Southern
Shift has the fronting of /uw/ leading the fronting of /ow/; in the CT/NY
stuff that I have, there might be a wee bit of fronting of /uw/, but it's
not unusual for /ow/ to have more formant movement than any other vowel.

Because of the nature of these studies (monosyllables, with fixed
consonantal context), I can't say anything about context effects. Unlike
the fronting of /uw/ in this neck of the woods, the fronting of /ow/ isn't
facilitated in any way by a preceding dental consonant. If I had to guess,
I'd say the following consonant (if any) doesn't play a role, making this
different from the old New England checked-o in ROAD and COAT, which PEAS
(the only relevant book I have at home) says was quite limited, even back
Alice Faber                                       tel. (203) 865-6163
Haskins Laboratories                              fax  (203) 865-8963
270 Crown St                                   faber at
New Haven, CT 06511                               afaber at

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