Back upgliding vowels in earlier Baltimore English

Authors

  • Margaret Renwick Johns Hopkins University
  • Aidan Malanoski Graduate Center at CUNY
  • Shaily Mistry Johns Hopkins University
  • Mashal Nawabi Johns Hopkins University
  • Yasmin Roach Johns Hopkins University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v11i1.6069

Keywords:

oral history, corpus linguistics, sociophonetics, dialect, Baltimore

Abstract

What spoken-language features characterize speakers from Baltimore, Maryland, and how have they changed in apparent time? Situated in the Mid-Atlantic dialect region, Baltimore is argued to lack “substantial differences” with Philadelphia, though its lexical isoglosses stretch west, and it also shows Southern influences. We reveal local distinctness among Baltimoreans living in predominantly Black East Baltimore and White working-class Hampden. We phonetically analyze three back upgliding vowels /aʊ oʊ u/, which are all synchronically (though differently) fronted by these groups. Our data come from the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project, which contains 232 oral history interviews with Baltimoreans born 1879--1951.

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Published

2026-06-19

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 1 (2026): Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Margaret Renwick, Aidan Malanoski, Shaily Mistry, Mashal Nawabi, Yasmin Roach

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.

How to Cite

Renwick, Margaret, Aidan Malanoski, Shaily Mistry, Mashal Nawabi, and Yasmin Roach. 2026. “Back Upgliding Vowels in Earlier Baltimore English”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 11 (1): 6069. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v11i1.6069.