Philly's Accent is Changing

If you say "wooder ice" when you order a water ice treat or cheer "Go Iggles!" when the Eagles football team is playing, chances are you're from Philadelphia or "Fluffya."
A new Penn linguistics study shows that traditional Southern inflections associated with Philadelphia native-born speakers are being affected by Northern influences.
"A Hundred Years of Sound Change," published in the March issue of the journal Language, documents Philadelphia's changing accent through an analysis of speech patterns of city residents spanning more than a century.
The study is co-authored by William Labov, professor of linguistics and director of Penn's Linguistics Laboratory; Josef Fruehwald, a doctoral candidate in linguistics and Ingrid Rosenfelder, who worked on the National Science Foundation supported study as a postdoctoral student at Penn.
The team developed new computational methods to research how Philadelphian's pronounce vowels and applied the computations to years of language data, which Labov's students first began collecting in 1973.
"This is a breathtaking view of language change over a long period of time," Labov says. Approximately 1,000 people were involved in the study with 380 analyzed so far.
Nearly a million measurements show that two-thirds of the Philadelphia vowels are in the process of change. In one instance, the vowel used in the word "ate" has steadily moved closer to the vowel of "eat," as shown by the speaker's date of birth from 1888 to 1992. This results in the word "day" pronounced "dee" as in "Sundee" rather than Sunday. The change in progress affects equally people of all educational levels, both men and women.
"A 'snake' in the grass becomes a 'sneak' in the grass as the long vowel 'a' is pronounced with the speaker's jaw in a higher position," Labov says.
The vowel of "out" and "down" has reversed direction, after moving toward a distinctively different Philadelphia sound for the first half of the century. For those born in the '50s and later, this vowel moved progressively back towards its position in 1900.
In the earlier period, many Philadelphia features resembled those found in Southern dialects, and these are the changes that have reversed direction. Those that have not are movements towards patterns heard in the Northern dialects of western New England, New York state and the Great Lakes Region. The "Northernization" of the Philadelphia region is related to other findings on the direction of linguistic change in North America.
The full study is available at muse.jhu.edu/jo....