Abstract
The dialect of Northern Minnesota English (NMNE) has been acknowledged as a leading suspect in the search for the Minnesota accent. Bartholdi (2015) produced a video, asking Minnesotans: “Are You MN Enough”? The majority of those who responded associated the Minnesota accent in the video with Northern Minnesota. This study seeks to reveal just what that particular dialect of Northern Minnesota actually looks like acoustically. Twenty speakers from the queried region were recorded saying the following eleven vowel phonemes three times [i, ɪ, e, ɛ, æ, ɑ, ɔ, o, ʊ, u, ʌ] within an isolated hVd structure. The recordings were imported into Praat, spliced, measured, and analyzed for six acoustic correlates: F1, F2, F3, duration, F0, and intensity. The total number of tokens analyzed in this study is 3,960 (20 x 11 x 3 x 6). Some of the main characteristics of NMNE are the following: the merger of the “lot” [ɑ] and “cloth” [ɔ] vowels, the reversal of positions of the “kit” [ɪ] and “face” [e] vowels, and the fronting and lowering of the “foot” [ʊ] vowel.[1]
[1] The labeling of vowels follows J.C. Well’s lexical set, as used and explained in Ladefoged and Johnson (2015:102-103).
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Backstrom, Michel
(2019)
"An Acoustic Phonetic Analysis of Northern Minnesota English Vowel Spaces,"
Linguistic Portfolios: Vol. 8, Article 3.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling/vol8/iss1/3
