A Phonetic Exploration of the English of Portland, Maine
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2014
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
Linguists in the United States have been interested in the dialects of English-speakers from
Maine for many decades (e.g., Perkins 1927, Heffner 1938, Lambert 1976), but few researchers
have focused exclusively on Maine in more recent years. To contribute to this research, I
studied the speech of residents of Maine currently living in the Portland area. Filling this gap in
the literature is important because more recent data on the speech of Maine English is needed to
provide a current view of the linguistic situation of Maine as well as a more complete
geographic view of New England speech as a whole. I designed my study to be a survey of the
current state of English in Portland, Maine. I focused on the phonetics of Maine residents,
particularly the nasal short-a system, the NORTH-FORCE distinction, and the LOT-THOUGHT
merger.
Using these characteristics as a jumping-off point, I compared the general findings of
Labov et al. (2006) and Nagy and Roberts (2008) to the results of my own speakers in a
synchronic analysis of the current overall characteristics of Portland speech. While my analysis
finds both similarities and differences between the current speech of Portland and what prior research suggests, it is my hope that this exploration will serve as a starting point for further indepth
research on how people speak in Portland, Maine.