Contextualizing /s/ retraction: Sibilant variation and change in Washington D.C. African American Language

Recent work has demonstrated an ongoing change across varieties of English in which /s/ retracts before consonants, particularly before /tE/ clusters (e.g., Lawrence, 2000; Shapiro, 1995; Stuart-Smith et al., 2019). Much of this work has focused on the social and linguistic distributions of /stE/ within single communities, without an examination of the broader sibilant space (e.g., /s/ and /E/). Meanwhile, analyses across multiple corpora have shown that /s/ and /E/ also show within-community variability, beyond /stE/ contexts (Stuart-Smith et al., 2019, 2020). Intersecting these approaches, this paper explores sibilant variation and change across /stE/, /s/, and /E/ using a corpus of Washington D.C. African American Language (AAL). Results indicate that /stE/-retraction is a stable variant in this variety of AAL and /s/ and /E/ show evidence of socially stratified variation and change. Overall, this paper demonstrates the need to examine the sibilant space more holistically when examining changes in /stE/.

Duke Scholars

Author Tyler Kendall