Philadelphia English


Philadelphia English or Delaware Valley English is a variety or dialect of American English native to Philadelphia and extending throughout the city's metropolitan area, including southeastern Pennsylvania South Jersey, counties of northern Delaware, and the north Eastern Shore of Maryland. The dialect is also spoken in such cities as Camden, Wilmington, Reading, Vineland, Atlantic City, and Dover. Philadelphia English is one of the best-studied varieties of English, as Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania was the home institution of pioneering sociolinguist William Labov. Philadelphia English shares certain features with New York City English and Midland American English. Philadelphia and Baltimore accents fall under what Labov described as a single Mid-Atlantic dialect, encompassing the middle of the Mid-Atlantic United States.
According to linguist Barbara Johnstone, migration patterns and geography affected the dialect's development, which was influenced by immigrants from Northern England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Today, a marked or "heavier" Philadelphia accent is most commonly found in Irish-American and Italian-American working-class neighborhoods.

History

By the twentieth century, the Philadelphia and New York accents shared features not found elsewhere, including: a high vowel, which helps to maintain a contrast between words like cot and caught; and a phonemic split of the short a vowel,, causing gas and gap to have different vowels sounds. Philadelphia's short a split appears to be a simplified variant of New York City's split.
Unlike New York City English, most speakers of Philadelphia English have always used a rhotic accent, meaning that the r sound is never "dropped".
Philadelphia accents from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s shared certain features of the regional accents of the American South and Midland: for example, in fronting, raising, and sometimes weakening. Philadelphians began developing their own entirely unique phonological features, remaining similar-sounding to New York City's English. Some higher-educated Philadelphians born since the last quarter of the twentieth century have been showing dialect levelling and more use of unmarked Northern American English features. This demographic regularly replaces the traditional Philadelphia split with the more General American tensing of only before nasal consonants; this probably began when its members attended college.
As of today, "the most strongly supported generalization is that Philadelphia has moved away from its Southern heritage in favor of a Northern system, avoiding those forms that are most saliently associated with local phonology." In the city of Philadelphia proper, the dialect has evolved further, especially among younger residents, and the "White Philadelphian dialect" is now spoken by a numerical minority of all Philadelphians within the city of Philadelphia itself, though it remains strong throughout the Philadelphia metropolitan region.

Linguistic features

Pronunciation

Vowels

The vowels in Philadelphia speech have shown volatility across the last century, as Labov's research has identified changes affecting over half of the vowel phonemes.
  • vowel: A feature unique to Middle Atlantic speakers and southern New Englanders is the raising and diphthongization of, as in, to or even higher. The raised variants often appear as diphthongs with a centering glide. As a result, Philadelphia is resistant to the cot–caught merger. Labov's research suggests that this pattern of raising is essentially complete in Philadelphia and seems no longer to be an active change.
  • - split: Similarly, the single word "on" has the vowel of "dawn" and not the same vowel as "don." Labov et al. regard this phenomenon as occurring not only in the Mid-Atlantic region but also in all regions south of a geographic boundary that they identify as the "ON line," which is significant because it distinguishes most varieties of Northern American English from most varieties of Midland and Southern American English.
  • Southeastern vowel fronting: One of the features that Philadelphia shares with dialects of the whole Southeastern United States is the fronting of a variety of vowels. This includes and ; the resulting allophones are around and, respectively. Generally, greater degrees of fronting are heard when the vowels appear in "free" positions than in "checked" positions. Fronting does not occur in the context of following liquids leading to a significant difference between, e.g., goat and goal. The fronting of and is well established in Philadelphia, though cross-generational data show that it remains an active change. Fronted nuclei in are well established in Philadelphia speech as in New York. More recent research has noted a tendency among the middle-aged and younger generation of Philadelphians to raise the vowel, resulting in., the vowel in foot, is sometimes fronted though not to the degree seen with and.
  • Short-a split: As in New York and Baltimore accents, historical "short a" has split into two phonemes: lax and tense . Their distribution in Philadelphia along with Baltimore, however, is different from that of New York City. Generally, in the Philadelphia-Baltimore system, the vowel is tensed before the consonants,,,, and in a closed syllable, and in any words directly inflectionally derived from root words with this split. Therefore, pass and passing use the tense, but passage and passive use the lax. The lax and the tense reflexes of are separate phonemes in these dialects, though largely predictable using the aforementioned rules. There are exceptions, however; the three words bad, mad, and glad become tense, and irregular verbs ending in "-an" or "-am" remain lax. can also be found in closed syllables in words where a vowel was recently elided closing the syllable such as camera, family, and catholic. The words mad and sad do not rhyme in Philadelphia or Baltimore, but do for New York City and all other English dialects. Not all Philadelphians today have this feature and some are beginning to favor the more General American tensing of short a only before nasals ; in fact, as a general rule, native Philadelphians consistently have that split system only if their own parents are native Philadelphians.
  • Mary–marry–merry three-way distinction: As in New York accents and most native English accents outside North America, there is a three-way distinction between Mary ~, marry, and merry ~. However, in Philadelphia some older speakers have a merger of and before , so that merry is merged instead with Murray. Labov, Ash, and Boberg report that about one third of Philadelphia speakers have this merger, one third have a near-merger, and one third keep the two distinct. Relatedly, as in New York, many words like orange, Florida, and horrible have before rather than the used in many other American dialects.
  • Canadian raising occurs for but not for . Consequently, the diphthong in like may begin with a nucleus of mid or even higher position, which distinguishes it from the diphthong in line. Canadian raising in Philadelphia occurs before voiceless consonants, and it is extended to occur before some voiced consonants as well, including intervocalic voiced stops as in tiger and spider. Fruehwald argues that has actually undergone a phonemic split in Philadelphia as a result of Canadian raising. The raising of is unusual as the innovators of this change are primarily male speakers while the other changes in progress are led primarily by females. The sociolinguistic evidence suggests this raising is a fairly recent addition to Philadelphia speech.
  • ,, and vowels: Traditional Philadelphia speech shows lowered and/or laxed variants of were common:. The recent sociolinguistic evidence indicates a reversal of this trend such that the vowel is now commonly raised and fronted. This raising is heard primarily before consonants. The Linguistic Atlas researchers recorded lax variants of near. As with, recent research suggests this trend is being reversed by raising and fronting of the vowel often to a position well beyond. This raising occurs before consonants ; in word-final position, remains lowered and lax. Both of these can lead to nonstandard phonemic incidence.
  • Labov's research has indicated a tendency toward lowering of the lax vowels and. This pattern is not yet well established and is labeled by Labov as an "incipient" change.
  • Many Philadelphians use a rather high, back, and perhaps even rounded vowel for as in ; something near. The so-called horse–hoarse merger takes place, and the merged vowel is typically mid to high back; it can be as high as. As noted in New York, these tendencies toward backing and raising of and may constitute a chain shift. The evidence suggests the movement of began this shift, and this vowel is relatively stable today, while generational differences are heard in the shifting of.
  • , as in may be more raised than in other dialects; sometimes it is as high as.
  • , as in, may show raised and back variants. In some cases, the vowel is in the high, back corner of the vowel space near. This is reportedly a recent development and is one more common among male speakers.

    Consonants

  • Philadelphia forms the core of the one fully rhotic major region of the traditional American East Coast. This area runs from Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey down to Delaware and northern Maryland, and remains fully r-pronouncing today.
  • *Non-rhoticity can be found in some areas of Philadelphia, however such as among working-class male speakers specifically from South Philadelphia, especially those born in the first half of the twentieth century and of Italian, Jewish, or Irish Catholic descent. On the other side of the socioeconomic spectrum, non-rhoticity in speakers from the Philadelphia Main Line may be a result of wealthy families sending their children to expensive boarding schools in the United Kingdom up until the 1960s and thus acquiring a "Transatlantic accent." Non-rhoticity is most prevalent among black Philadelphians, who largely do not demonstrate the regional speech features of Philadelphia English; instead, many black Philadelphians speak African-American Vernacular English.
  • Consonant changes, especially reductions and lenitions, are very common in informal conversational speech, so that:
  • *The sibilant is palatalized to before. Thus, the word streets might be pronounced "shtreets".
  • * L-vocalization is quite pervasive in Philadelphia speech. Phonetically it may be realized as something like or a velar or labio-velar glide, or, or the consonant may be deleted altogether. Among Philadelphians, as in other dialects, vocalization occurs quite frequently in word-final and pre-consonantal contexts. In a more unusual development, vocalization may also occur inter-vocalically in Philadelphia. This tendency is more common when appears following low vowels bearing primary word stress. This variable also shows some lexical conditioning, appearing, for example, with exceptionally high frequency in the pronunciation of the name of the city. This, in part, leads to the stereotype of Philadelphia being pronounced as "Fluffya" or "Filelfia."
  • * As in other areas, the interdental fricatives and are often realized as stops, and or affricates and in Philadelphia speech. This variation appears to be a stable class-stratified feature with the non-fricative forms appearing more commonly in working-class speech.
  • * The yew–hew merger can be found, as in New York City, in which words like human and huge, which begin with an cluster, the is commonly deleted giving and.
  • * Consonant cluster reductions, such as removing the "t" sound from consonant clusters, so that "mustard" sounds more like "mussard," or "soft" like "sawff."