High School Choice and the Social Meanings of Sound Change in Chicago

Benheim, Jaime

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-j5zy-h730

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High School Choice and the Social Meanings of Sound Change in Chicago

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As sound changes advance across large geographic areas, they progress unevenly across populations. The speakers who lead these changes often share macro-social identities, like place or social class affiliations (e.g. Nesbitt 2018; Wagner et al. 2016). But the features undergoing these macro-level sound changes also hold social meanings related to more micro-level, interactional contexts (Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Eckert 1989). Recently, the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS) has been observed to be reversing in the Inland North (D’Onofrio & Benheim 2020; McCarthy 2011). In this dissertation, I explore the relationship between these macro- and micro-scale social meanings by examining how an ongoing sound change, the reversal of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS), is unfolding among Chicago-area adolescents. Using sociolinguistic interviews, social evaluation tasks, and meta-commentary drawn from interviews and perceptual dialectology, I ask how the local-level social contexts created by various high school types may influence the social meanings that are attached to regional features associated with white speakers in perceptual evaluations, and how this might in turn influence adolescents’ uptake of these features in production, contributing to this macro-scale sound change. Adolescents appear to navigate a series of dichotomies, balancing ideologies depicting the Midwest as standardized or normative in linguistic terms with opposing ideologies considering urban areas like Chicago to be racially, socioeconomically, and linguistically marked. I find that schools and other institutions play a critical role in students’ understandings of their own positionalities within the broader social and linguistic landscape. Through circulating discourses surrounding high school choice, students are socialized into ideologies about institutionally-based social hierarchies and what it means to sound “elite” with respect to the NCS, via their exposure to similarly positioned peers in school. That is, high school choice guides adolescents’ understandings of their social positions along a hierarchy of school elite-ness, which itself is mapped onto the degree to which students engage with particular socially meaningful elements of the NCS. In social evaluations, participants associated Northern Cities-shifted vowels with lower socioeconomic status. In production, they recruit these same vowels – Northern Cities-shifted TRAP and LOT – to index a different, though related, hierarchy: school elite-ness. This demonstrates how the social meaning associations formed in local-level contexts like schools might scale up towards macro-social demographic factors, leading to broader patterns of sociolinguistic variation in the context of a sound change reversal. More generally, I argue that institutions like schools serve as organizing forces in structuring who interacts with whom and, consequently, serve as points of connection between micro- and macro-level social meaning.

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