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Abstract

This research is a continuation of the Roswell Voices project, a linguistic and oral history project began in 2002 by Dr. William Kretzschmar and the Roswell, GA Folk and Heritage Bureau, in an attempt to capture the reality of linguistic change in a dynamic environment. While the project originally focused on the past and the interviewing of older residents, I investigated how the speech phonetics, syntax, and lexicon of inhabitants of Roswell aged 18 to 30 groups them together as a distinct community. I also endeavored to characterize how their speech fits into the large picture of dialect research in the American South and whether new patterns and categorizations are pertinent. To accomplish this task, I interviewed nine informants for one hour each, discussing life in Roswell, and each interview is fully transcribed. For comparison, I also looked at interviews of older informants from previous stages of Roswell Voices. I looked for common speech phrases and lines of discussion to point to a sense of community. In order to establish where my younger speakers fall in the spectrum of Southern dialectology, I consulted the relevant literature to compile a discrete list of features, and then perform a statistical analysis to determine the significant recurrence of these features in the speech of my informants. I also ran a computer-based acoustical phonetic analysis to aid in determining the extent to which my informants follow the proposed Southern Vowel Chain Shift, as well as to independently value their acoustic properties as a group.

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