This weekend, I had the opportunity to present twice at the 4th Annual Linguistics Conference at UGA. One was planned and the other was a last-minute fill-in for someone who couldn’t make it. I was happy to do both.
Friday’s presentation was called The linguistic effects of a changing timber industry: Language change in Cowlitz County, WA. Here, I talk about some of the sudden linguistic changes that I found in apparent time and suggest that they had to do with changes in the timber industry around that time. Because this was last-minute, it is basically a precursor to (and a slideshow version of) my NWAV46 poster that I’ll be giving in a few weeks. You can download the slides for this talk here
Saturday’s presentation with Kyle Vanderniet was called Consonantal variation in Utah English: What el[t]se is happening[k]?. We talked about three variables that seem to be particularly salient in Utah English
The various pronunciation of words like mountain, button, or satin with the last syllables as [ʔn̩], [ʔɨn], or [tʰɨn].
Insertion of [t] between /ls/ clusters, as in fal[t]se or el[t]se.
Realizing word-final ing as [ɪŋk].
You can see our slides for this presentation here. Edit: we later presented additional findings from this research at ADS2018.]