Phonetic Distinctiveness as a Sociolinguistic Variable (2007)

I begin with a distinction between engendered variation, that is, sex-based phonetic-level variation that shows consistent patterns across communities, and nongendered variation. Much of engendered variation is anatomically-determined, but there is also an important behaviourally-determined component. One example of behaviourally-determined engendered variation is that women speak more clearly, as reflected in their more-dispersed vowel space. I argue that this sex-based difference applies to all types of phonological contrasts, not just vowels, so that the temporal and acoustic correlates of phonological constituents produced by women are differentiated typically more than those produced by men. Furthermore, I demonstrate that “phonetic distinctiveness” indexes other social categories such as social gender and social class, i.e., is a sociolinguistic variable.I corroborate the indexing of social categories in two major applications. First, I compare phonetic correlates in the speech of eight male radio DJs from a range of music genres with ratings of how macho-sounding each DJ is. For each DJ, I examine durational differences between contextual and inherent long and short vowels. As expected, social gender significantly correlates with the vowel duration distinctiveness so that the more macho-sounding DJs produce less distinct vowel length contrasts. Second, I examine dispersion of front and back vowels in the speech of 439 speakers from the Atlas of North American English (Labov et al. 2006). Vowel dispersion is shown to correlate with both sex and social class.That men typically produce less distinct contrasts than women leads to predictions about the role of sex in phonetic-level sound change. Specifically, if the innovative form results in the loss of phonetic distinctiveness (such as two vowels merging), then we predict that men lead the change. An investigation of vowel mergers among the Atlas of North American English speakers reveals that men do lead mergers, and that speakers with a less dispersed vowel system show more instances of mergers, regardless of sex. Thus phonetic distinctiveness as an explanation of sound change accounts for why men lead sound changes that result in loss of phonetic distinctiveness, while women lead sound changes that maintain phonetic distinctiveness