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- Title
Getting fed up with our feet: Contrast maintenance and the New Zealand English “short” front vowel shift.
- Authors
Margaret Maclagan; Jennifer Hay
- Abstract
The dress vowel in New Zealand English (NZE) has been raising for some time, so that it now overlaps the acoustic space of fleece for many younger speakers. This article presents an acoustic analysis of the dress and fleece vowels of 80 speakers and shows that dress continues to raise in contemporary NZE so that for some speakers dress has risen above fleece and can be more front than fleece. fleece has diphthongized as a consequence, making it part of the New Zealand “short front vowel” shift. This suggests that the short/long distinction in New Zealand English may have broken down, at least for the front vowels. The diphthongization of fleece is most advanced in tokens that are followed by voiceless codas. These are the tokens that are most endangered by the high dress, as they are distinguished neither in acoustic space, nor by length.
- Subjects
AUSTRALIA; VOWELS; PHONOLOGY; ENGLISH language; ENGLISH dialects; PHONETICS; DIPHTHONGS
- Publication
Language Variation & Change, 2007, Vol 19, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0954-3945
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S0954394507070020