The Unbearable Whiteness of Fleeing: Identity, demographics, & sound change in North America

Speaker: Gerard Van Herk (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

Abstract:
Across America, large regional sound changes have taken place in the past century. These changes are well-described and somewhat explained linguistically, but not socially. How can we account for the timing and distribution of changes like the vowel shifts of the inland South or the Great Lakes region, or the decrease in R-lessness in the coastal South and New York City? Why are there so many social exceptions to participation? This talk expands earlier claims that all these changes are triggered by increased contact with, or awareness of, African American English speakers, resulting from migration, desegregation, and the civil rights movement. I investigate the implications for sociolinguistic method and theory of this "white flight" argument (and vice versa) with respect to concepts of accommodation, social identity, agency, whiteness, oppositional identity, markedness, overshoot, and conflict. I then suggest that the demographic (migration and segregation) evidence supporting a white flight view in the US might mean something very different in a Toronto context. The talk is deliberately speculative and exploratory, and invites input from audience members from across social sciences disciplines.