| Popis: |
Hasidic Yiddish (HY), brought to the U.S. by post-Holocaust immigrants, is currently the native language of five generations of bilingual speakers in New York. In this new contact setting, a unified variety is emerging, which has diverged from its Eastern European Yiddish parent dialect(s). The present study is a bilingual comparison whose aim is to examine, for a subset of HY and English vowels, how early HY-English bilinguals organize their phonetic system(s), and to explore the degree and direction of cross-linguistic influence. To that end, 24 early HY-English bilinguals, eight per generation (starting with Gen2, the children of immigrants), were recorded reading monosyllabic HY and English CVC words containing the vowels /i, ɪ, u, ʊ, a/ (approximately 100 tokens per speaker, ten of each vowel). Pillai scores were calculated for each vowel category by generational group to measure the extent of overlap in the category by language. For /u/, Pillai scores were calculated separately for the lexical sets TOO and HOOP, reflecting the implicational hierarchy attested in North American English in these contexts (Fridland 2008; Hall-Lew 2009; Labov et al. 2005; Wong 2014). The findings suggest apparent time change be- tween Gen2 and Gen3/Gen4 in two areas: 1) spectral overlap of /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ in the two languages; and 2) relative advancement of English vs. HY /u/. Specifically, HY and English high lax vowels are qualitatively distinct for the oldest generation but show greater convergence in the younger generations. Additionally, while Gen2 HOOP and TOO both overlap cross-linguistically, English /u/-sets of Gen3 and Gen4 show more fronting. The results are interpreted with reference to models of second language acquisition, emphasizing how differences in language input might result in the acquisition of different systems. This study illustrates how an understanding of the dynamic nature of the language systems of individual learners can help explain structural change observed in the language of a speech community. |
