A comparison of turn-of-the-century and turn-of-the-millennium speech in Georgia

The Elsewhere Shift, defined here as the lowering and retraction of the front lax vowels,

is a now-widespread phenomenon in North American English. However, few studies document its

presence in the South. This study analyzes speech from two corpora of Georgians, one representing

contemporary speech and another representing language from a century ago, to demonstrate the

presence of the Elsewhere Shift in the South. Generalized additive mixed-effects models fit to

formant measurements extracted from these corpora suggest a recession of traditional Southern

dialect features (glide-weakening in PRICE, the Southern Vowel Shift) and the adoption of the Elsewhere

Shift (the low back merger, retracted front lax vowels), both in relative position in the F1-

F2 space as well as formant trajectory shape. In addition to providing the first real-time analysis

of English in urban Georgia, this study confirms the Elsewhere Shift’s status as a pan–North American

dialect feature.