The actuation of American Raising in the Heart of America

This chapter examines the emergence of American Raising in Kansas City, a large metropolitan area straddling the Missouri-Kansas border in the American Midland. Noting the absence of a sociolinguistic or dialectological source of American Raising in Kansas City, it seeks to account for the actuation of the innovation in the speech community. It reports formant measurements of PRICE for 91 Kansas Citians born from 1884 to 1999. It shows American Raising to be a recent innovation, which sits at the end of a longer chain of changes in the productions of PRICE vowels, and suggests that the evolution of the PRICE vowel from a relatively monophthongal low vowel to an upgliding diphthong during the twentieth century created the phonetic precursor to actuate offglide raising, which in turn provided the precursor for nuclear American Raising. It also identifies emergent social meanings for American Raising among Kansas City females born in the 1990s that connect American Raising to high educational attainment, and suggests that these social meanings are also necessary for the actuation of American Raising in Kansas City