Substrate Influence, Intergenerational Reallocation, and Inclusion of Historical Data from Multilingual Immigrant Speakers: Monophthongal /oʊ/ in Seattle, Washington

Publication Date

9-1-2025

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Journal of English Linguistics

Volume

53

Issue

3

DOI

10.1177/00754242251368937

First Page

289

Last Page

323

Abstract

Given long-standing dimensions of power and oppression, historical sociolinguistics endeavors to augment data representing diverse identities and demographics at earlier points in time. The language use of some groups has been systematically unavailable or excluded from the data sources scholars rely on to do reconstructive work, limiting insights about the development of regional varieties of English and perpetuating a predominately white, male, and native-speakerist perspective. Studies in heritage linguistics enrich this view by integrating data from multilingual, migrant speakers. The current study examines the role of heritage in dialectal variation by examining a group commonly unrepresented in regional dialectological studies: immigrants. The study explores the development of a regional speech feature, monophthongal /oʊ/, using oral history interviews with first- to third-generation Swedish and Norwegian immigrants born in the 1920s through 1940s alongside non-Scandinavian Seattle residents born 1900 through 1927. This work explores substrate influence and intergenerational reallocation in the emergence of monophthongal /oʊ/, showing that the feature was established in Seattle English by or before the 1920s among Seattle-born individuals who do not identify as Scandinavian and that it is mediated by phonological environment. There is some evidence for the feature being reinforced by first-generation immigrants (Swedish and Norwegian speakers) who show a flat, back-gliding trajectory for /oʊ/, especially in open syllables. Consistent with focusing and reallocation, subsequent generations of Scandinavian Americans develop a progressively more pronounced allophonic contrast between diphthongal [oʊ] in open syllables and monophthongal [o] before voiceless consonants. This case study has implications for methods in historical language studies, offering an example of archival data sources that may improve our understanding of how heritage languages of U.S. immigrants and English language learners impact the development of regional dialect features.

Funding Sponsor

University of Washington

Keywords

dialect formation, ethnolects, heritage linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, language contact, language variation and change, Seattle English, sociophonetics

Department

Linguistics and Language Development

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS