Some sociolinguistic evaluations of performances of the California Vowel Shift: a matched-guise study

Sociolinguistic studies (Eckert: 2000; Labov: 1966; 1972) have shown that some allophones can carry social meaning. The use of a given allophone can indeed inform about the age, gender, or social class of a speaker. The aim of this paper is to report on the findings of a study investigating some social meanings attributed to performances of the California Vowel Shift (CVS), a chain shift that affects almost all vowels of American English, which undergo a counterclockwise rotation. The CVS is regularly used in parodic performances on television to portray clueless, vapid, shallow characters, which suggests that this phenomenon might be associated with potentially stigmatizing social meanings. To test this hypothesis, a quantitative perceptual study was conducted with 123 students of California State University, Northridge. They were asked to rate four voices: that of one male and one female speaker pronouncing the same sentence with their standard accent and while performing the CVS. The rating of the voices by participants was done with a seven-point semantic differential scale to test for the perception of six variables. Results show that the perception of friendliness, pleasantness, education, and competence is heavily affected by the presence of the performance of the CVS, suggesting that performances of the chain shift are indeed given social meanings by participants. The perception of the other variables, age and gender, do not seem to be significantly influenced by the performances, however. It is argued that the acoustic properties of some of the vowels of this chain shift may index stigmatizing traits for the participants. Four hypotheses are explored to explain these results: the idea that participants may share a common ideology regarding the CVS because of parodic media representations they may have been in contact with, the principle of sound iconicity, a “linguistic uncanny valley,” or a form of linguistic misogyny