Crossroads at the linguistic market

Authors

  • M.J. Antiqua-Parlee Memorial University of Newfoundland

Abstract

Local identity practices are not as straightforward as originally predicted (Labov 1972a, 1963). I buildon previous work on local identity practices in coastal rural communities (e.g. Josey 2004, Labov1972a, Wolfram 1997) in an investigation of feature maintenance and identity practices on MountDesert Island, a tourist-dependent community in New England. Based on sociolinguistic interviewswith 12 native speakers of the MDI community, I find that the use of a local feature, the dropping ofpost-vocalic R (e.g. “car”, pronounced variably as [ka:], is moribund in the community. Ther-less variant is still in use by older speakers, and among these speakers a gender pattern and a pattern with respect to a speaker's source of capital emerge (Bourdieu 1991, 1972, 1986).

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Published

2017-03-15

How to Cite

Antiqua-Parlee, M. (2017). Crossroads at the linguistic market. Linguistica Atlantica, 35(2). Retrieved from https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/la/article/view/25499

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Articles