Pacific northwest vowels: A Seattle neighborhood dialect study

According to current literature a large region encompassing nearly the entire west half of the U.S. belongs to one dialect region referred to as Western, which furthermore, according to Labov et al., ‘‘... has developed a characteristic but not unique phonology.’’ [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono—atlas/NationalMap/NationalMap.html] This paper will describe the vowel space of a set of Pacific Northwest American English speakers native to the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Wash. based on the acoustical analysis of high‐quality Marantz CDR 300 recordings. Characteristics, such as low back merger and [u] fronting will be compared to findings by other studies. It is hoped that these recordings will contribute to a growing number of corpora of North American English dialects. All participants were born in Seattle and began their residence in Ballard between ages 0–8. They were recorded in two styles of speech: individually reading repetitions of a word list containing one token each of 10 vowels within carrie...