| Popis: |
We analyze dialect accommodation of pretonic midvowels /e/ and /o/ in the speech of 32 Northeastern migrants living in the Southeastern state of São Paulo/Brazil. Both vowels undergo lowering in Northeastern dialects (hɛ.ˈlɔ.ʒiw ‘watch’, hɔ.ˈmã ‘pomegranate’) but not in the Southeast (cf. he.ˈlɔ.ʒiw, ho.ˈmã). We thus analyzed whether these speakers, in accommodating to the host community’s dialect, tend to raise none, one or both vowels. Analyses of 1,916 tokens of /e/ (μF1 = 475Hz, sd = 47) and 1,645 tokens of /o/ (μF1 = 482Hz, sd = 51), extracted from sociolinguistic interviews, show that there’s a significant but weak correlation between the vowels’ height (Spearman’s rho = 0.38, p < 0.05), signaling uniformity in dialect accommodation. Further analyses of the individuals’ speech show that only half of them accommodated to either none or both vowels, and that accommodation to both vowels depends on speakers’ early arrival at the host community. |
